Julia Flynn Siler

Julia Flynn Siler (2017) is a journalist and author based in Northern California. She was a London-based staff writer for The Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek and her work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Oxford Dictionary of Food and Wine.

Julia’s first book, “The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty,” was a New York Times bestseller and was honored as a finalist for both a James Beard Foundation award and a Gerald Loeb Award, the latter for distinguished business reporting. Her second book, “Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure” was also a New York Times bestseller. She was named a 2016-2017 National Endowment for the Humanitites  “Public Scholar” to support her third book, “Daughters of Joy: America’s Other Slaves and Their Fight for Freedom,” forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf.

A graduate of Brown University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Julia currently serves on the boards of the San Francisco-based Litquake Foundation, which hosts literary events throughout the year in the Bay Area, and the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, the oldest writing conference in the West. She is also a two-term member of the Council of the Friends of the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. She is a nonfiction juror for the Commonwealth Club’s California Book Awards.

Julia will be revising “Daughters of Joy,” the story of an unlikely pair of sex slavery activists working in turn-of-the-century San Francisco, during her session as a Logan Nonfiction Program fellow. She also hopes to work on the multimedia aspects of the project using archival photographs, primary documents, and film footage.