Anna Holmes

Anna Holmes
Anna Holmes in Griffith Park, Los Angeles
Born
California, United States
NationalityAmerican
Alma materNew York University
Known forFounder of the Jezebel blog
AwardsMirror Award for Best Commentary, 2012
Websiteannaholmes.com

Anna Holmes is an American writer and editor. In 2007, she founded the Gawker Media women-focused site Jezebel.

Early life and education

Holmes was born in California and studied journalism at New York University.

Career

In 2007, she founded Jezebel. Writing for Mother Jones, Tasneem Raja says Holmes developed "a site for women interested in both fashion and how the models were treated. She built it into a traffic behemoth, with 32 million monthly pageviews and beloved features like Photoshop of Horrors and Crap Email From a Dude."[1] Rebecca Carroll described Holmes's Jezebel launch as drawing "immediate attention with its off-color humor (similar in tone to Gawker, but more so a refreshingly new tone altogether), feminine bluster and fearless, pointed criticism of mainstream women’s magazines, an industry in which Holmes worked for many years, for perpetuating unattainable ideals of beauty and an endless (heterosexual) preoccupation with men."[2] Holmes served as editor-in-chief until she left the site in 2010.

She has been a columnist for the New York Times Sunday Book Review[3] and has previously served as editorial director at Fusion.[4] She joined Fusion as editor of digital voices and storytelling in 2014, part of a "Web talent grab for a fledgling TV channel: [f]irst Felix Salmon, now a much-admired writer and editor."

Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and Time. In April 2016, Holmes joined First Look Media as senior vice-president of editorial to develop a new media property, Topic, focused on visual storytelling. In 2018, Topic won two prestigious National Magazine Awards, making Holmes the third Black editor-in-chief to ever receive the honor. [5]

Holmes was a staff writer for Glamour.[6]

She currently writes the "Work Friend" column for the New York Times.

Works

  • Hell Hath No Fury: Women's Letters from the End of the Affair, Random House Publishing Group, 2003, ISBN 9780345465443
  • The Book of Jezebel: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Lady Things, Grand Central Publishing, 2013, ISBN 9781455502790[7][8]

References

  1. ^ Raja, Tasneem. "How Jezebel smashes the patriarchy, one click at a time". Mother Jones. No. November/December 2013. Retrieved 10 October 2016.
  2. ^ Carroll, Rebecca. "La Vie en Jezebel". The Aesthete. Archived from the original on 11 October 2016. Retrieved 11 October 2016.
  3. ^ Raja, Tasneem. "How Jezebel Smashes the Patriarchy, Click by Click". Mother Jones. No. November/December 2013. Retrieved 23 October 2014.
  4. ^ "Fusion shuffles digital editorial team". Politico. 24 April 2015. Retrieved 2016-06-24.
  5. ^ Sterne, Peter (March 30, 2016). "First Look brings on Anna Holmes to develop new property". Politico. Retrieved 2016-06-24.
  6. ^ Filipovic, Jill. "Get That Life: How I Founded Jezebel and Became a New York Times Columnist". Cosmopolitan. Retrieved 23 October 2014.
  7. ^ Hess, Amanda (Oct 22, 2013). "Were You the One Who Did the Entry for Cunnilingus?". Slate. Retrieved 23 October 2014. Released today, The Book of Jezebel: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Lady Things, edited by Jezebel's founding editor Anna Holmes with contributions from a group of female writers, include Slate contributors Jessica Grose, Amanda Marcotte, and yours truly, is both an earnest celebration of the historical and pop cultural figures that have shaped women's lives in the 21st century and a compendium of elaborate menstruation jokes.
  8. ^ Doll, Jen (November 6, 2013). "Remembering the Early Days of Jezebel with Anna Holmes". The Hairpin. Archived from the original on June 27, 2023. it's a work of art, a humor book, a compendium of writing from an array of notable names, and an excellent guide to important topics of our time.