Zachary Pace

Zachary Pace is the author of I Sing to Use the Waiting: A Collection of Essays About the Women Singers Who’ve Made Me Who I Am, published by Two Dollar Radio on January 23, 2024.

I Sing to Use the Waiting is available from Two Dollar Radio!

Here is an author Q+A with Two Dollar Radio.

“Stealing moments from one’s own work to read only increases the delish moments of reading one can have when a book is itself delish. No higher praise have I for Zachary Pace and his yes once more delish collection of prose poems really about those songbirds that help give the queer soul his own voice. Covering national treasures including Cat Power, Whitney, Nina Simone, etc., it’s a compendium born of a true consciousness, one that is serious about and committed to articulating writing’s best and true subject: how we speak, and why.” —Hilton Als

“Zachary Pace’s I Sing to Use the Waiting is an exhilarating mix, part memoir, part examination of queer identity, part investigation into corporate heteronormativity and the internalized homophobia it produces in children and others who are still growing into who they are—and so much more, all of it approached via the lenses of the singers (and their lives) whom Pace encountered at pivotal moments in their own growing up. In considering a recording made by Nina Simone, for example, Pace comes to understand voice itself as a form of queerness, straddling registers, enacting a fluidity that refuses binary thinking; other singers—Fiona Apple, Mariah Carey, Joanna Newsom—become a source of actual vocabulary ‘for interpreting the world’; and in a discussion of Kim Gordon and Sonic Youth, Pace considers lyrics and music as entryways to the sublime, as a way ‘to remember the demise that is my only destiny, relieved I’ve eluded it for now.’ At one point, Pace says of Rihanna’s career that it ‘enacts a singularly liberating experience of identity expression.’ I’d say the same for I Sing to Use the Waiting, a beautifully provocative, smart, and tender book indeed.” —Carl Phillips

“Zachary Pace takes listening & fanhood to a teeming level of worship which is exactly what it is. Beautiful precise quirky bodily cerebral listening to female vocalists and writing about it. I’m so in awe of what I get when I read this dedicated performance of that. I think Kim (Gordon) should hear, Chan (Marshall) should hear. The chapter on the Kabbalah (and Madonna) was so astonishing. God should hear too: this miraculous and fun and deeply cool book that’s really about sound and our relationship to it, gendered, historic, mortal and true.” —Eileen Myles

“I’ve been waiting a long time to read a book as soulful and precise, in its treatment of listening, as Zachary Pace’s tender account of an identity put back together through the powerful elixir of singing women. Pace, a lover of the overlooked, attends to the brocaded minutiae of triumphs, comebacks, travails. To enunciation and excess, Pace brings a curatively lucid eye and ear, each vignette invested with lyric care, and with a fastidious affection for the contours of a singer’s career. This impeccable book sends me back, with a renewed heart, to the songs Pace masterfully covers, with a delivery as splendid, as emotionally impressive, as the lauded originals.” —Wayne Koestenbaum

“What makes up the soundtrack of our lives? In this smart, captivating collection of essays, Zachary Pace brings us theirs—an eclectic, fascinating, often groundbreaking group of frontwomen whose words and voices have defined not only the larger culture, but also who the author is and who they might yet be. The essays in I Sing to Use the Waiting deftly move from informative to deeply personal and back again, breaking down songs and words and voices that cannot be contained, that exist inside a world that is both mystifying and oppressive. If you’ve ever played a song or album so many times your neighbors complained; if you’ve ever obsessively analyzed playlists of shows near and far; if you’ve ever found a voice, a lyric, a harmony saving your life: this one’s for you.” —Lynn Melnick

“What draws us to the sound of another person’s voice? What magnetizes others to our own? I Sing to Use the Waiting is not only a thrilling homage to a group of majestic women, but an exploration into the nature of voice itself—that queer and primal animal signature. Zachary Pace writes with electric intensity. A total joy.” —Paul Lisicky

Publications

InsideHook: “What Can Great Vocalists Tell Us About the Music We Love?” (interview)
BOMB magazine: “Zachary Pace by Jameson Fitzpatrick” (interview)
Largehearted Boy: “Zachary Pace’s playlist for their essay collection ‘I Sing to Use the Waiting’” (essay)
Poets & Writers: “Ten Questions for Zachary Pace” (interview)
Literary Hub: “Zachary Pace on the Push and Pull of Working in Publishing as a Writer” (essay)
The Rumpus: “Listen Repetitively: A Conversation with Zachary Pace” (interview)
Debutiful: “Read an Excerpt from ‘I Sing to Use the Waiting’ by Zachary Pace” (interview and essay)
Hippocampus magazine: “Interview: Zachary Pace, Author of ‘I Sing to Use the Waiting’”

Reviews

Harvard Review: “I Sing to Use the Waiting reviewed by Richard Scott Larson”
Pitchfork: “Zachary Pace’s New Books Offers a New Way to Look at Queer Music”
The New York Times Book Review: “6 New Paperbacks to Read This Week”
The Millions: “Most Anticipated: Great Winter 2024 Preview”
Chicago Review of Books: “Most Anticipated Books of January”
Orange County Register: “20 highly anticipated books coming in 2024”
Bookshop.org: “100 most anticipated books of 2024”
Debutiful: “12 noteworthy debut books to read this January”
Inside Hook: “10 books you should be reading this January”
Lambda Literary: “January’s Most Anticipated LGBTQIA+ Literature”
Reviews in Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Split Lip Magazine
Lives of Writers podcast interview, Bookin’ podcast interview, All I Want to Do Is Talk About Madonna podcast interview

Events

January 23, 2024, McNally Jackson Seaport, with Wayne Koestenbaum
February 1, 2024, Greenlight Bookstore, with Lynn Melnick
February 8, 2024, Riffraff Bookstore (Providence, RI), with John-Francis Quinonez (Q)
February 13, 2024, Bard College Fisher Center, with Jack Ferver
February 24, 2024, Green Toad Bookstore (Oneonta, NY), with Maggie Millner
February 29, 2024, Books & Books at the Studios of Key West, with Angelo Nikolopoulos
April 1, 2024, The Miss Manhattan Non-Fiction Reading
April 3, 2024, Two Dollar Radio Headquarters (Columbus, OH)
April 6, 2024, Mission Creek Festival, Prairie Lights Bookstore (Iowa City, IA), with Fulla Abdul-Jabbar
April 11, 2024, Book Suey (Detroit, MI), with Zoya Gurm and Matt Harmon