Tajja Isen is a writer, editor, and voice actor. Her essays and criticism have appeared in dozens of outlets across the United States and Canada, and she is the editor-in-chief of Catapult magazine, the former digital editor of The Walrus, and the co-editor of the essay anthology The World As We Knew It: Dispatches from a Changing Climate. She has also edited for Electric Literature. In the nine essays in her debut collection, Some of My Best Friends: Essays on Lip Service (Atria/One Signal Publishers), Isen explores the absurdities of life in a world fluent in the language of social justice but not always committed to follow through. Some of My Best Friends takes on the cartoon industry’s pivot away from colorblind casting, the pursuit of diverse representation in the literary world, the law’s refusal to see inequality, and the cozy fictions of nationalism. Isen deftly examines the quick, cosmetic fixes society makes to address systemic problems and reveals the unexpected ways they can misfire. Braiding cultural criticism with her lived experience, she explores the gaps between what we say and what we do, what we do and what we value, and what we demand.
