Amy Wallace

Amy Wallace is a writer based in California. She splits her time between magazines and books. Her magazine work has appeared in GQ, Wired, The New Yorker, New York, Esquire, Vanity Fair, Details, The Nation, the New York Times Magazine, Elle, and other national publications. Two of her profiles – “Hollywood’s Information Man” (Los Angeles, 2001) and “Walking Time Bomb” (New York, 2019) – have been nominated for a National Magazine Award.

In 2014, Random House published Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration, by Ed Catmull, then the president of Pixar Animation and Disney Animation. Written with Wallace, it was a New York Times bestseller. In 2021, Simon & Schuster published Wallace’s second collaborative book: Hot Seat: What I Learned Leading a Great American Company, by Jeff Immelt, the former CEO of General Electric.

In addition to freelancing, Wallace has been a correspondent at GQ, an editor-at-large at Los Angeles magazine, and a monthly columnist on creativity and innovation (“Prototype”) for the New York Times Sunday Business section. She also served as a senior writer at Conde Nast Portfolio. She spent 11 years at the Los Angeles Times as a reporter covering state politics, higher education, and the entertainment industry. During that period, she shared in two staff-wide Pulitzer Prizes: in 1992, for coverage of the Los Angeles riots, and in 1994, for coverage of the Northridge earthquake. Later, she became the Times’ deputy business editor over entertainment and technology coverage.

Wallace’s stories and interviews have been included in New Stories We Tell: True Tales by America’s New Generation of Great Women Journalists (2019), The Best American Science Writing 2010,  The Best American Magazine Writing 2002, The Meanings of Dress, a textbook for design and merchandising students, and The Meaning of Life: Wisdom, Humor, and Damn Good Advice from 64 Extraordinary Lives, a compilation of Esquire’s “What I’ve Learned” columns.

Wallace began her career as an assistant to New York Times columnist James Reston after graduating cum laude with a B.A. in history from Yale. She then spent two years at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution covering prisons and death row, among other things. She lives in Pasadena with her husband, Dale.