10 Things You Don’t Know About…Cosmo’s Amy Odell

Cosmopolitan.com editor Amy Odell has had an extensive career in the publishing world. Since September 2013, she has overseen all of Cosmo’s booming digital presence. The website has more than tripled traffic in addition to being the number one channel on Snapchat Discover. Pre-Cosmo, Odell honed her talents at BuzzFeed, New York magazine, and The Cut. While you likely read her work, here are a few things you didn’t know about the digital guru in the latest installment of “10 Things.”

1. In high school, I was a hostess at a Tex-Mex restaurant near my house: I got in trouble regularly for doing my calculus homework on the hostess stand.
2. I graduated college in three years. I had that much AP credit from high school. Probably because I did homework all the time.
3. My summer job in college was being a stand-in on the set for Sin City, which filmed in Austin one year while I was home: This is a glorious way to earn a small hourly wage because you do absolutely nothing. Seriously, you’re just sitting around all day and then someone with a walkie talkie will ask you to go stand or sit on the set for maybe 20 minutes. Then you go back to doing nothing. The snacks are also abundant and wonderful.
4. I play the piano: Mostly classical, but I’m learning jazz.
5. I am obsessed with glitter: This is one reason it’s such a treat to work with Cosmo’s new unicorn correspondent, Glitter Fantasy, who travels the country throwing glitter everywhere and teaching restaurants how to make hyper relevant unicorn food.
6. My husband and I were set up: So yes, that actually does work.
7. My drink is a margarita: We love to shoot different margarita recipes for our food vertical, Cosmo Bites. We also keep a stash of Rita’s in the Cosmo refrigerator for impromptu happy hours.
8. One of the first celebrities I interviewed was Rihanna: It was in 2007, not long after “Umbrella” came out. I was a party reporter for New York mag, covering a charity event she was performing at. I tried to get her to say something buzzy and I couldn’t break her. She’s very well media trained.
9. I turned my book, Tales From the Back Row, into an Instagram account: I make all the memes myself based on what’s inspiring me at the moment.
10. Kanye West gave me a side-hug at the Rodarte show once: This was in exchange for not giving me an interview.