Jessa Crispin


Jessa Crispin is a critic, author, feminist, and the editor-in-chief of Bookslut, a litblog and webzine founded in 2002. She has published three books, most recently Why I Am Not A Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto.
She began as a publishing outsider who started the blog on the side while working at Planned Parenthood in Austin, Texas, and came to support herself by writing and editing the site full-time. In 2009, Crispin moved to Berlin. Later she returned to the United States. In May 2016, Crispin announced Bookslut's last issue; the archives will remain on the website. Bookslut received mentions in many national and international newspapers, including The New York Times Book Review and The Washington Post. In 2005 Crispin kept a diary about her work on books for The Guardian.
Crispin had a regular column called "Bookslut" in the online cultural journal The Smart Set, published by Drexel University. She was a book critic for NPR and contributor to PBS's Need to Know. She has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Chicago Sun-Times and The Globe and Mail, among other publications. She wrote the afterword to Melville House Books' reissue of Heinrich Böll's Billiards at Half-Past Nine.
In 2018, she married Nicolás Rodríguez Melo and interviewed him for her Public Intellectual podcast about the performance of masculinity and femininity. She has criticized married women in the past: "Marriage’s history is about treating women as property, and by being married you’re legitimising that history."

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