Tasha Robinson (associate editor/national) has this theory that all born entertainment writers start out doing scutwork in a related field: Her first job was in a library, and she's noticed that most A.V. Club critics started out clerking in music stores, book shops, and video-rental places. She maintains her theory by pointing to them and studiously ignoring any contradictory data. She grew up in Maryland, where she started writing bad genre fiction at age 7 or so, and she eventually went to the University of Iowa for the Writer's Workshop program, which not only broke her of writing genre fiction, but also turned her off fiction writing in general. Since then, she's been a critic, copyeditor, editor, and designer for various publications. She got a double BA at Iowa (film and journalism) in 1991, started writing for The A.V. Club in 1998, became a full-time writer-editor in 2000, and hasn't looked back since. Though she sometimes still wishes she worked in a library.