Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout
Teachout at the 2013 Texas Book Festival.
Born	(1956-02-06) February 6, 1956 (age 60) Cape Girardeau, Missouri
Occupation	Critic, biographer, librettist, author, playwright, stage director, blogger
Nationality	American
Education	St. John’s College; William Jewell College; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Genre	Criticism

Terry Teachout (born February 6, 1956) is an American critic,biographer,librettist,author, playwright, and blogger. He is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, the critic-at-large of Commentary, and the author of "Sightings," a column about the arts in America that appears biweekly in the Friday Wall Street Journal. He blogs at About Last Night and has written about the arts for many other magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times and National Review.

Teachout was born in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, the son of Evelyn (Crosno), a secretary, and Herbert H. "Bert" Teachout, a hardware salesman. He grew up in Sikeston, Missouri. He attended St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland; William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri; and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He lived in Kansas City from 1975 to 1983, working as a jazz bassist and writing about classical music and jazz for the Kansas City Star. He moved to New York City in 1985, working as an editor at Harper's Magazine (1985–87) and an editorial writer for the New York Daily News (1987–93) and as the News' classical music and dance critic (1993–2000). In 2004 he was appointed by President Bush to the National Council on the Arts, the advisory and review panel of the National Endowment for the Arts, completing his term in 2010. In 2005 he was hospitalized with congestive heart failure, but subsequently recovered. A political conservative with wide-ranging cultural interests and sympathies, he maintains cordial relationships with artists, critics, and bloggers from all parts of the political spectrum.