Jia Tolentino

Jia Angeli Carla Tolentino (born 1988) is an American writer and editor. She is a staff writer for The New Yorker. She has previously worked as deputy editor of Jezebel and a contributing editor at The Hairpin. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine and Pitchfork.

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. Tolentino attended an evangelical megachurch and a small Christian private school. She has a younger brother. Tolentino started elementary school early, and would graduate from high school as her class salutatorian. In 2005, she enrolledat the University of Virginia where she was a Jefferson Scholar-Joseph Chappell Hutcheson Scholar. While at the University of Virginia, she studied English, joined a sorority, and participated in an a cappella group.

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

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

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

In 2019, Tolentino published a collection of essays entitled Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion. 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."

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 at UVA.