Jia Tolentino

Tolentino was born in Toronto, Ontario, to parents from the Philippines. When she was four years old they moved to Houston, Texas, and she grew up in a Southern Baptist community.[7][8][9][10][11] Tolentino attended an evangelical megachurch and a small Christian private school.[11] She has a younger brother.[11] Tolentino started elementary school early, and would graduate from high school as her class salutatorian.[11] In 2005, she enrolled at the University of Virginia[12] where she was a Jefferson Scholar-Joseph Chappell Hutcheson Scholar.[13] While at the University of Virginia, she studied English, joined a sorority, and participated in an a cappella group.[11]

After graduating from UVA in 2009, she spent a year in the Peace Corps and served in Kyrgyzstan,[7] going on to earn an MFA from the University of Michigan.[14]

Tolentino began writing working for The Hairpin in 2013, hired by then-editor-in-chief Emma Carmichael.[15][16] In 2014, Tolentino and Carmichael both moved to Jezebel, where Tolentino worked for two years before joining The New Yorker.[4]

Tolentino's work has won accolades writing across genres. Flavorwire called her a "go-to music source,"[17] while her first short story won the fall 2012 Raymond Carver Short Fiction Contest[18] and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.[19] She has also drawn attention for essays on topics like race in publishing,[20] marriage,[21] abortion,[22] and notions of female empowerment,[23] as well as for no-holds-barred music criticism: The A.V. Club admired "Tolentino's sick burns on Charlie Puth"[24] 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."[25] Tolentino has reported extensively on the #MeToo movement.[26][27][28]

On August 6, 2019, Tolentino published a collection of essays entitled Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion.[16] 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.[29] 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."[30]

As of 2019, Tolentino lives in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn with her dog and her boyfriend, an architect whom she first met while both were students at UVA.[11] In the essay "I Thee Dread" in her book Trick Mirror, Tolentino writes at length about her ambivalence toward marriage.[31][32] On August 15, 2020, Tolentino announced via Instagram that she had given birth to a baby girl.[33]

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Jia Tolentino

• Official website
• Jia Tolentino at The New Yorker
• Interview with Jia Tolentino at Catapult.co
• All the Greedy Young Abigail Fishers and Me, Jezebel, June 28, 2016.