Filipino literary writers looking for benchmarks for success in their craft will find valuable insights in the remarkable writing career by far of Jia Tolentino, a young American writer (two months shy of 31) and editor who was born in Canada to parents from the Philippines.
JIA TOLENTINO: ILLUSTRATION BY JOANNA NEBORSKYJia is currently a staff writer of
The New Yorker and contributor to various magazines (
The New York Times Magazine,
Pitchfork Magazine). Her very first short story, “The Odyssey,” won the fall 2012 Raymond Carver Short Fiction Contest and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Since then she has won accolades for frank, often no-holds-barred critical essays on a wide range of issues like race in publishing, marriage, abortion, and female empowerment. Her collection of essays that was published this year,
Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, has received rave reviews both in the U.S. and overseas.
JIA TOLENTINO. PHOTOGRAPH: ALLISON MICHAEL ORENSTEIN/THE OBSERVERJia has been an inveterate blogger since she was 10, learning to mess up on the Internet where she “would see these great waves of disapproval and anger and morality” and thrived on her “uncommon amount of freedom to negotiate it.”
Read Eva Wiseman's featured interview of Jia Tolentino in the August 11, 2019 issue of TheGuardian.com UK now!Read Jacqueline Rose’s “Song of My Self-Care,” in the October 20, 2019 issue of The New York Review of Books now!
