Mallary Tenore Tarpley is an award-winning author and an assistant professor of practice at the University of Texas at Austin’s Moody College of Communication and the McCombs School of Business, where she teaches journalism and writing. Mallary specializes in a variety of topics, including longform feature writing, narrative nonfiction, personal essay writing, solutions journalism and nonprofit journalism.
Her debut book, SLIP: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery blends memoir, reporting, and research to explore the under-discussed complexities of eating disorders and recovery from them. While working on the book, Mallary received a generous grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to support her science-related reporting. An internationally recognized book, SLIP won the Association of American Publishers’ 2026 PROSE Excellence Award for Biological and Life Sciences. It also won first place in the Clinical Medicine category and was a finalist for Outstanding Work by a Trade Publisher. The book is available in Canada, the UK and Australia, and a Spanish version (titled Desliz) will be published in June 2026 for distribution in the U.S., Latin America, and Spain.
Mallary has traveled the country giving talks about eating disorder prevention and recovery, and what she calls “the middle place” between acute sickness and full recovery. She also frequently delivers memoir-writing trainings for organizations such as The Poynter Institute and the Writers’ League of Texas.
Mallary started her time at UT Austin as associate director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, an international training and outreach center for journalists. Previously, she was executive director the nonprofit Images & Voices of Hope, where she developed a storytelling genre called restorative narrative — stories that show how people and communities are finding meaningful pathways forward in the aftermath of trauma. Mallary began her journalism career at The Poynter Institute, a world-renowned journalism think tank, where she served as managing editor of Poynter.org and taught professional journalists how to ethically use social media.
Mallary’s articles and personal essays have been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, TIME Magazine and Teen Vogue, among other publications. She maintains a weekly newsletter, Write at the Edge, featuring writing tips and best practices.
Mallary holds a bachelor’s degrees in English and Spanish from Providence College and a master’s of fine arts in nonfiction writing from Goucher College. She lives in the Austin area with her husband and two children.
