Julia Flynn Siler

Julia Flynn Siler is a New York Times best-selling author and journalist. Her new book, The White Devil’s Daughters: The Fight Against Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown, will be published by Alfred A. Knopf in May of 2019. Her most recent book is Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure. Her first book was the The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty.

As a veteran correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek magazine, Ms. Siler spent more than two decades in the Europe and the United States, reporting from a dozen countries on topics as varied as biotechnology, cult wines, puppy breeding, and a princess’s quest to restore a Hawaiian palace’s lost treasures. Her stories and reviews have also appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Oxford Encyclopedia on Food and Drink in America.

A front page story for the Wall Street Journal led to her book The House of Mondavi, which involved more than 500 hours of interviews and examination of tens of thousands of pages of documents. Published by Penguin's Gotham Books in 2007, The House of Mondavi was honored as a finalist both for a James Beard Award and a Gerald Loeb Award for distinguished reporting and is now in its eleventh printing.

Her critically-acclaimed second book, Lost Kingdom, was also a New York Times bestseller.

In August of 2016, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded Ms. Flynn Siler a “Public Scholar” grant for 2016-2017 to support her latest project, The White Devil’s Daughters.

In June of 2017, the Mayborn Graduate Institute of Journalism announced that Ms. Siler had been awarded a Mayborn Fellowship in Biography to support the book. She was also named a Logan Nonfiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Greater Good, where she spent the fall of 2017 completing her manuscript.

Ms. Siler is a longtime member of the San Francisco-based writing group North 24th Writers, whose members have published fourteen nonfiction books as well as hundreds of articles and essays in major magazines, newspapers and literary journals. She is also a member of the San Francisco Writer’s Grotto. She has taught journalism at the University of London’s Birkbeck college and led nonfiction workshops at the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley.