Kim Ruehl is a writer focused on the intersection of music and community.
She has written for Billboard, NPR Music, Seattle Weekly, and various others. She was editor of No Depression — the roots music journal — for nine years. She was instrumental in bringing the magazine back to print as a high-end, ad-free quarterly journal, and ended her run there in 2017 as editor-in-chief.
Her book, A Singing Army: Zilphia Horton and the Highlander Folk School (UTexas Press), was chosen as one of NPR’s “2021 Books We Love.” Her podcast, Why We Write with Kim Ruehl, ran twice monthly from 2021-2023 and remains available via Folk Alley and wherever you get your pods.
Kim lives with her family on Maine’s Midcoast and runs the weekly Substack DIG UP THE ROOTS.
Kim’s writing has appeared in:
- Billboard magazine
- The Bluegrass Situation (BGS)
- CityArts magazine
- Columbia Journalism Review
- CNN
- Folk Alley
- folkmusic.about.com
- Good Country/BGS
- Mountain XPress
- No Depression
- NPR Music
- Seattle magazine
- Seattle Weekly
- Shuffle magazine
- Sound magazine
- The Washington Post
- West Coast Performer magazine
- Yes magazine
She has contributed to these books:
- Awakenings: Stories of Bodies and Consciousness, edited by Diane Gottlieb (ELJ Editions)
- The World of Bob Dylan, edited by Sean Latham (Cambridge University Press)
- Woman Walk the Line: How the Women in Country Music Changed Our Lives, edited by Holly Gleason (University of Texas Press)
- Dylan: Disc by Disc, edited by Jon Bream (Voyageur Press)
Kim Ruehl 