Jo Piazza is an acclaimed author, journalist, and podcaster living in Fitler Square with her husband and three children. She has written seven books of various genres and has published articles in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, TIME Magazine, and other notable publications. Piazza has also created seven podcasts, some of which have topped the charts in terms of viewership. Piazza began her career in journalism after receiving her bachelor’s degree from Penn. In her senior year, she interned at the New York Times, subsequently receiving a master’s degree from Columbia. She then became a gossip columnist for New York Daily News; drawing from this experience, she wrote her first book in 2013.

A focal point of Piazza’s writing career has been celebrities and social media influencers; in her time at New York Daily News, she became acutely aware of the changing dynamics surrounding influencer culture, realizing that celebrities were now making the majority of their money from brand deals, sponsorships, and promotions, rather than from their actual career. As she puts it, “celebrities were becoming brands outside of what they were doing,” and she witnessed countless examples of companies “paying celebrities for their brands and their personalities.” This experience motivated her to write Celebrity, Inc. as a study of how today’s celebrities actually make their money.

Piazza’s books cover a wide range of topics and genres: Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win is a political novel, offering a dramatic and suspenseful story of what it’s like for a woman to run for political office. How to be Married is Piazza’s memoir of her first year of marriage, while If Nuns Ruled the World is a non-fiction account of how nuns are a driving force of positive change in society. Piazza has also written two collaborative novels with author Lucy Sykes: The Knockoff and Fitness Junkie.

At this point in her career, Piazza writes mainly fiction; her newest novel, The Sicilian Inheritance, releasing in April, is a murder-mystery based on the real-life murder of her Sicilian great-grandmother. According to Piazza, it is “the best book [she’s] ever written, and also [her] favorite.” She travelled to Sicily numerous times to research for the book, digging into her own family history to discover long-forgotten details. The Sicilian Inheritance is available for pre-order, and as a bonus, anyone who pre-orders will receive a lifetime membership to Piazza’s Substack, “Over the Influence.”

Piazza describes her writing process as “super stream-of-consciousness”; she never outlines, and doesn’t edit until she has written at least fifty pages. She writes between two and three thousand words per day, and can write “anything, anywhere.” She ascribes this consistency to her experience as a journalist, as reporters “don’t have the luxury of getting writer’s block.” To new and aspiring authors, she gives the advice: “you just have to get your butt in a chair and get it done. There’s never a right time to write a book, just like there’s never a right time to have a baby.”

Piazza began her podcasting career after being approached by How Stuff Works, a digital media company, to turn her book How to be Married into a podcast of the same name. Following the success of this initial foray, she has created multiple other podcasts, including Committed, which explores “hilarious, heartbreaking, and inspiring stories” of couples who have stayed together through difficult circumstances, Fierce, which tells the stories of little-known women who have significantly impacted the course of history, and Under the Influence, which investigates the social media industry and its manipulative influencer-based marketing tactics. Piazza loves the medium of podcasting: “it’s so intimate. . . and people still have an attention span for it.”

Piazza describes her ideal reader as “any woman who wants to sit down and get lost in a book.” Her books appeal to women in all phases of their lives; she finds great importance in elevating women’s stories throughout her work, whether it is as an author, a journalist, or as a podcaster. She strives to strike a balance in her writing, avoiding both pretention and pulpiness; she finds that much modern fiction is either overly literary and highbrow, or conversely, too self-indulgent and undemanding. Her work takes the best of both worlds, being well-constructed and thoughtful, but also deeply enjoyable to read.

Piazza grew up in Bucks County, and has lived in Philadelphia since 2019. In 2020, she moved to Fitler Square; some of her favorite places to write in the neighborhood include Rival Bros Coffee, Friday Saturday Sunday, Cotoletta, and Fitler Club. Her upcoming novel is her “most Philly book yet”: the main character is a Philly native, and portions of the story are set in the city. According to Piazza, “living here makes [her] want to set all [her] books in Philly. . . Too many books are set in NY and LA.” She is also working on a new murder mystery story that will take place in Fitler Square.

Jo Piazza’s work can be found at her website, jopiazza.com, and her Substack, jopiazza.substack.com. As mentioned previously, her upcoming book, The Sicilian Inheritance, is releasing April 2^nd; it is available for pre-order on Amazon.