My name is Jay A. Fernandez, and I’ve been a writer, reporter, and editor, both on-staff and freelance, for more than 25 years at a number of top-tier publications (see list below). After getting my start writing book criticism at The Washington Post, I moved to New York and worked in the editorial departments of Barnesandnoble.com and Premiere, the country’s top film magazine. In 2000, I moved to Los Angeles to become managing editor of Code, a minority men’s culture magazine. A few years later I launched and wrote “Scriptland,” a weekly column on the personal and professional lives of screenwriters, for the Los Angeles Times, and then jumped to the staff of The Hollywood Reporter, where I was a senior film reporter for four years. I was then briefly senior writer and news editor at Indiewire.
As a journalist, I’ve written cover features, breaking news, social justice journalism, cultural criticism, artist profiles, book and music reviews, business stories, Q&As, op-eds, production stories, crossword puzzles, humor pieces, ghostwritten columns, and more. Over the years, I’ve been a guest blogger, written liner notes for CDs, done copywriting for a progressive film production company, copyedited for magazines, associate-produced a DVD series of in-depth interviews with Hollywood’s most successful screenwriters, and worked in marketing at Universal Music Group. I also co-created and co-edited THR’s first and only stand-alone Comic Con issue, for which we recruited writer-director Jon Favreau as guest editor. As I mentioned, I’m versatile. (My crowning achievement on that front may well be having ghostwritten a regular column called “Tall Tales” for Pistons-Bulls-Lakers phenom John Salley about fashion for extremely tall African-American men.)
In recent years, I’ve added writing and editing work for the development departments of significant cultural, medical, and civil rights institutions such as the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the NYCLU, and City of Hope. This work has included annual reports, donor appeals, impact reports, and digital fundraising proposals.
As an editor, I’ve worked with investigative journalists, culture reporters, essayists, book critics, and individual authors looking to improve their book manuscripts for pitching to agents and editors. I can improve most any kind of writing, from merely correcting the spelling, punctuation, and grammar through to shaping and developing content on the macro level. I’ve been doing it for a long time and can make just about anyone’s fiction, nonfiction, or journalism sing — or at least give strong, concrete suggestions for revision. After all those years in newsrooms, I’m also hardwired for deadlines and quick deep-dives into unfamiliar topics. I’m available to help English departments, nonprofits, individual writers, artist collectives, students — anyone who needs help improving his writing generally or on a single piece of work.
