Jia Tolentino
Filipino-American writer and editor From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jia Angeli Carla Tolentino[1] (born 1988)[2] is an American writer and editor.[3][4] A staff writer for The New Yorker,[5] she previously worked as deputy editor of Jezebel and a contributing editor at The Hairpin.[6] Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine[7] and Pitchfork.[8] In 2019, her collected essays were published as Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion.
Jia Tolentino | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1988 (age 35–36) |
| Nationality | American / Canadian |
| Education | University of Virginia (BA) University of Michigan (MFA) |
| Occupation(s) | Writer, editor |
| Years active | 2013–present |
| Employer | The New Yorker |
Tolentino was born in Toronto, Ontario, to parents from the Philippines. When she was four, her family moved to Houston, Texas, where she grew up in a Southern Baptist community.[9][10][11][12][13] Tolentino attended an evangelical megachurch and a small Christian private school.[13] Tolentino started elementary school early and graduated from high school as her class salutatorian.[13]
At the age of 15, she participated in the game show Girls v. Boys in Puerto Rico.[13]
In 2005, Tolentino enrolled at the University of Virginia[14] as a Jefferson Scholar,[15] studying English, joining the Pi Beta Phi sorority, and participating in an a cappella group called The Virginia Belles.[13] After graduating from UVA in 2009, Tolentino spent a year as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kyrgyzstan.[9] Tolentino earned an MFA from the University of Michigan.[16]
Tolentino began writing for The Hairpin in 2013, hired by then-editor-in-chief Emma Carmichael.[17][18] In 2014, Tolentino and Carmichael both moved to Jezebel, where Tolentino worked for two years before joining The New Yorker.[6]
Tolentino's writing has won accolades[19] across genres. Flavorwire called her a "go-to music source,"[20] while her first short story won the fall 2012 Raymond Carver Short Fiction Contest[21] and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.[22] She has also garnered favorable attention for essays on topics such as race in publishing,[23] marriage,[24] abortion,[25] and notions of female empowerment,[26] as well as for her no-pulled-punches music criticism. The A.V. Club admired "Tolentino's sick burns on Charlie Puth"[27] and Studio 360 observed that even in the near-universal panning of Magic!'s song "Rude", "no criticism has been quite as cutting as Jia Tolentino's."[28] Tolentino has reported extensively on the #MeToo movement.[29][30][31]
In 2017, Tolentino was named in the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the media category.[32]
On August 6, 2019, Tolentino published a collection of essays entitled Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion.[18] It made its debut on The New York Times Bestseller List on August 25, coming in at #2 on the Combined Print & E-Book Non-fiction list.[33] In a review for The New York Times, Maggie Doherty wrote: "Tolentino’s earnest ambivalence, expressed often throughout the book, is characteristic of millennial life-writing, and it can be contrasted with boomer self-satisfaction and Gen X disaffection in the same genre." Slate columnist Laura Miller wrote in her review of the book, "Tolentino is a classical essayist along the lines of Montaigne, threading her way on the page toward an understanding of what she thinks and feels about life, the world, and herself."[34] Lauren Oyler's negative review of Trick Mirror in the London Review of Books, "skewer[ed] the essays’ shallowness and prose quality," though Tolentino reacted positively to the review, calling it a "cleansing, illuminating experience to be read with such open disgust!"[35][36]
Her 2021 reporting on the conservatorship of Britney Spears, co-authored with Ronan Farrow, attracted international attention,[37][38][39] with the piece being described as "blistering" by Tyler Aquilina in Entertainment Weekly[40] and as a "journalistic reference text on Britney Spears" by Dirk Peitz in Die Zeit.[41]
In January 2023, Tolentino made a cameo in the HBO Max show Gossip Girl.[42]
Tolentino met her husband, Andrew Daley, an architect, while they were students at UVA.[13][43] In the essay "I Thee Dread" in her book Trick Mirror, Tolentino writes at length about her ambivalence toward marriage.[44][45] They have two children.[46]
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