Jia Angeli Carla 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. A staff writer for The New Yorker, she 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. In 2019, her collected essays were published as "Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion". Tolentino's writing has won accolades across genres. Her first short story won the fall 2012 Raymond Carver Short Fiction Contest and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has also garnered favorable attention for essays on topics such as race in publishing, marriage, the #MeToo movement, abortion, and notions of female empowerment, as well as for her no-pulled-punches music criticism.