Tony Scherman is the author of Backbeat: Earl Palmer's Story, which won a 2000 ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for excellence in music writing. He was an editor at Musician and Audio and a contributing editor at Life; he has written about art, music, American history, and American culture for dozens of publications, including the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Arts and Leisure section, Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone, Smithsonian, American Heritage, New York, Entertainment Weekly, and People. He was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 1997. A magazine article he wrote that year about the poet-activist-professor Melvin Tolson was the basis for the 2007 Denzel Washington film The Great Debaters. He has two daughters and lives in Rockland County, New York.
