All posts by Andrea Valdez

Andrea Valdez, a Houstonian, received a BA in English from the University of Texas at Austin in 2005 and received her MSJ from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in 2006. Two days after graduating from Medill, she began working at Texas Monthly as a fact-checker. In addition to dutifully guarding the magazine's integrity, she wrote more than forty columns in a series titled "The Manual," a short lesson on activities every Texan should know how to do. The column has since been turned into a book, How to Be a Texan: The Manual. Valdez moved to the digital side of editorial in 2011, and in 2014 she became the editor of texasmonthly.com. During her tenure, the site's traffic has increased more than 250 percent and Texas Monthly's social media audiences have more than quintupled. She also helped launch two verticals—TM Daily Post and TMBBQ.com—and had a hand in a major redesign of texasmonthly.com in 2013. She lives in Austin.