Erica Palan is a Philadelphia-based editor, writer and social media manager. She is currently creating social media strategies in the newsrooms of Philly.com, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News. Prior to that, she spent a year learning the business of social media at Chatterblast, a boutique agency focused on content strategy and social media marketing. She’s also served as the digital managing editor of Phillymag.com for more than three years, where she wrote regularly for both the website and the print magazine.

In past lives, Erica worked as the arts and entertainment editor at Philadelphia Weekly, as a cashier at a plus-size lingerie store (about which she contributed anonymous humor columns to the now-defunct Philadelphia Will Do), and as a waitress at a Northeast Philly pizza joint. She contributed regularly to MentalFloss.com until December 2013.

She currently lives in the Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia, where she hangs out with her husband and their two rescue cats. In her free time, she enjoys obsessing over Bruce Springsteen, reading dystopian YA fiction, binge-watching Netflix, eating fish tacos and trying to convince herself that urban biking isn’t scary.