Paulina Pinsky

Paulina Pinsky is a writer and educator based in Los Angeles. She received her MFA in Nonfiction Creative Writing from Columbia University, where she has been teaching comedy writing to high schoolers since 2017. She received her B.A. in American Studies with a concentration in Media and Popular Culture from Barnard College, where she wrote her undergraduate thesis on Joan Rivers. Through a feminist disabilities lens, she explored the comedy, plastic surgery, and red-carpet culture that Joan Rivers created, fostering the theory of the “Spectacle of Defacement”. Not only did she study comedy from an academic standpoint, but she went on to pursue the Second City Conservatory in 2016, where she studied improvisational and sketch comedy.

She is the co-author of It Doesn't Have to be Awkward, published by Clarion Teen in September 2021. Most notably, in October 2021 she was a finalist for Longridge Review’s Barnhill Prize for her essay, “Other Mother”. Additionally, she was a 2021 MacDowell fellow and has been published in Narratively, Human Parts, Columbia Journal, Slackjaw Humor, and HuffPo Women, among others. She is currently working on a memoir.