Alissa Wilkinson is a critic at the New York Times. Her book "We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine," a cultural history of American myth-making in Hollywood through the life and work of Joan Didion, was published by Liveright on March 11, 2025. She teaches nonfiction writing at NYU and the Center for Fiction. Her previous book, "Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking and Living from Revolutionary Women," was published in 2022. 

Alissa has been writing criticism since 2005, and her work has appeared in Vox, the NYT Book Review, Vulture, Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, The Dallas Morning News, The Los Angeles Review of Books, RogerEbert.com, Books & Culture, and many more. She earned an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction writing from Seattle Pacific University and an M.A. in humanities and social thought from New York University.