Alexandra Leigh Young was born with a top 40 song stuck in her head. Her pop-music dreams came true in college when she got a gig in concert production and went on tour with Third Eye Blind, New Kids On The Block, Nick Lachey, and many more. In 2014, she was awarded an artist residency in South Korea, where she fell in love with a new kind of music: K-pop. After spending a year reporting on South Korea’s music industry, she returned to the US and produced ‘K-paparazzi,’ a podcast episode for WNYC’s Radiolab. The episode was the inspiration for her debut YA novel, Idol Gossip (Walker US/Candlewick 2021). She currently lives in New York City, and is the deputy producer at The New York Times’s news podcast, The Daily.