JEN BALDERAMA

about

Jen Balderama is a senior editor at The Atlantic.

Previously, she was:

• An editor in the Opinions section of The Washington Post, where she edited staff columnists and commissioned op-eds and essays by contributing writers.

• A freelance editor of books and essays, with clients’ work published by Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, PublicAffairs, Oxford University Press, Outside magazine, and others.

• An editor at The New York Times Book Review, where she appraised galleys and assigned and edited reviews, columns, and essays. While a member of the Book Review, Jen was a 2012–13 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, where she studied literary and cultural criticism and narrative writing. She also completed her (long-delayed) bachelor’s degree, as a student in the New School’s Writing and Democracy Honors Program.

• An editor on the National desk of The Times and in the Business and Sunday Source sections of The Post (on an earlier tour), and the first copy chief at CNET News.com, in San Francisco.

• A Dow Jones News Fund editing intern at the Santa Cruz Sentinel and a staffer at The Guardsman, the student newspaper of City College of San Francisco.

Jen has also been an editorial mentor for the Center for Fiction’s Emerging Writer Fellowships; an adjunct faculty member in the Writer’s Studio at the University of Chicago’s Graham School; an instructor for The New York Times Student Journalism Institute, a pop-up newsroom for college journalists and recent graduates; a mentor for Girls Write Now, which educates and supports underserved teens in New York City; and a speaker at conferences and other public events on editing, writing, and careers in journalism and publishing.

Before she became an editor, Jen was a ballet dancer. (She has also, over the years, danced salsa and bachata, Lindy Hop, tango, blues, and burlesque.) In dance and prose, she values nuance, clarity, rhythm, surprise, intelligence, humor, and beauty.