He has been recognized with awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Jerome Foundation, and the American Composers Forum, among others, and has been the subject of profiles in The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town,” BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme, The Los Angeles Times, Il Manifesto (Italy), Globo (Brasil), Semana (Columbia), The Guardian (the United Kingdom), Fox News Channel (The Mike Huckabee Show), and The New York Post, among others.

Also a scholar, Pieslak is the author of Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War, published by Indiana University Press, and as a writer about music he is represented by the Markson Thoma Literary Agency. Pieslak’s writings have appeared in Music Theory Spectrum, Theory and Practice, Journal of Musicological Research, Popular Music, Music Theory Online, The Ashgate Companion to Modern Warfare, the Journal of Music (Ireland), Global Dialogue (Cyprus), The Musical Times,  and Army.