Veronica Esposito

Veronica Esposito writes about entertainment and culture through the lens of how art, film and literature shape identity, power and social justice. Her work treats popular culture, gallery shows and environmental crisis as connected stories about who is heard and who is ignored, bringing lived experience and marginalised voices into coverage that might otherwise stay at the surface.

Film, visual art and cultural coverage

At the Guardian, Esposito contributes to film coverage that focuses on directors, anticipated releases and the emotions viewers bring to their favourite movies. She writes in collaborative formats such as roundups on David Fincher’s films and the new releases that Guardian writers are most excited about, adding perspective on mood, themes and why certain titles matter in the present moment.

Her cultural reporting extends to visual art, including coverage of major print exhibitions such as “Hockney in Hawaii: museum curates artist’s largest print exhibition to date,” and shows that trace the radical history of zines, where she reports on how independent publishing and DIY practices remain “a very alive and capacious medium.” Across these pieces she treats entertainment as a broad field that includes cinema, museum programming and alternative publishing, showing how mainstream and fringe culture intersect.

Esposito’s entertainment writing is grounded in a clear interest in the social and emotional stakes of cultural work rather than box-office or industry news.

Her film pieces emphasise storytelling, aesthetics and the particular sensibilities of directors and performers, while her art and design stories look at how institutions frame artists and movements, who is included, and how audiences encounter challenging or experimental work. In the climate crisis feature “Climate change is a form of oppression: the voices affected most by environmental crisis,” she applies the same cultural-reporting tools to environmental storytelling, centring people who experience climate change as a daily constraint and showing how their testimonies expose structural inequalities behind abstract headlines. Her entertainment beat therefore stretches from films and exhibitions to environmental narratives, tied together by an attention to narrative voice and the lived experience behind cultural phenomena.

Trans literature, translation and the written word

Beyond the Guardian, Esposito is deeply involved in literary culture, especially trans literature and translation. She is a columnist on language and translation, writing the “Untranslatable” column for World Literature Today, where she explores topics such as book covers in translation and the emotional charge of untranslatable terms. Essays like “Book Covers in Translation” and “Sehnsucht” examine how design, word choice and cultural context shape a reader’s encounter with translated work, foregrounding the relationship between aesthetics and meaning.

In longform essays such as “Toward a Trans Literature of the Everyday,” “How Imagining Other Worlds Can Help You Imagine Other Selves,” and “How to Tour the Most Bookish Island in the World,” she writes about trans life, speculative worlds and literary tourism, treating fiction and criticism as tools for self-understanding and community-building.

Esposito has a long-standing practice around literary translation and criticism, having worked with translation in multiple capacities and authored four books. Her writing has appeared in outlets including the Guardian, the New York Times, World Literature Today, Xtra Magazine and KQED, as well as other literary venues. She has also served as a judge for the National Book Award in Translation in 2022, which underscores her role in evaluating and championing international literature for a broad readership.

This body of work distinguishes her coverage on the entertainment beat: she approaches films, exhibitions and cultural trends with the sensibility of a critic who thinks about translation, cross-cultural dialogue and the specific conditions under which marginalised narratives reach audiences.

Social justice, lived experience and therapeutic insight

Esposito’s public profile combines journalism with therapeutic practice, which informs the way she writes about entertainment and social issues. She is a licensed marriage and family therapist who specialises in serving transgender individuals and supporting people through trauma, life transitions and narrative change. Professional bios describe her as a writer and transgender advocate whose work spans arts, lifestyle and social justice across multiple outlets, including the Guardian and KQED.

This dual focus gives her reporting a consistent concern with how structural forces - oppression, exclusion, climate crisis - show up in everyday life and in the stories people tell about themselves.

In coverage of environmental crisis, Esposito frames climate change explicitly as a form of oppression, listening to voices that are affected most and treating their accounts as essential evidence rather than background colour. In essays on trans literature and speculative worlds, she writes about how imagining other selves and other worlds can be a way to process trauma and envision new possibilities, bringing therapeutic and advocacy perspectives into literary criticism. Her entertainment and culture writing often highlights communities and identities that have been marginalised, whether through the radical history of zines, the visibility of trans narratives in literature, or the ways gallery shows and films speak to those living with systemic constraints. The through-line is coverage that treats culture as a site where oppression, care and imagination meet, anchored in detailed attention to language and in respect for the lived experience behind every story.