Julia Flynn Siler

Julia Flynn Siler is an award-winning author and journalist. Her most recent book, The White Devil’s Daughters: The Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown, was a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice” and a finalist for a California Book Award. She is also the author of the bestselling nonfiction books Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, America’s First Imperial Adventure, and 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 Europe and the United States, reporting from a dozen countries. She has covered fields as varied as biotechnology, cult wines, puppy breeding, and a princess’s quest to restore a Hawaiian palace’s lost treasures.

A graduate of American Studies at Brown University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Ms. Siler began her career as a staff correspondent for BusinessWeek, working in the magazine’s Los Angeles and Chicago bureaus. She wrote stories on everything from White Castle “sliders” to the roiling futures markets for the New York Times. She earned an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management by taking night classes at night.

In 1993, she was awarded a fellowship to teach business journalism in Prague, where she organized a speaker series at the Center for Independent Journalism, a not-for-profit organization supported in part by the New York Times Foundation. Ms. Siler then served as a London-based staff correspondent for BusinessWeek. She was a member of BusinessWeek reporting teams that won a National Magazine Award, a Deadline Club award, and other honors.

As a longtime London-based foreign correspondent, she wrote about family business dynasties, millionaire dons at Oxford and Cambridge, and Virgin founder Richard Branson, among other subjects. Toward the end of her years in London, she joined the Wall Street Journal as its European management correspondent, traveling throughout the region to report stories. During that time, she did post-graduate work in finance at the London Business School. 

After returning to the U.S., one of the first articles she wrote for the Wall Street Journal was about the turmoil within the Mondavi family’s wine empire. It ran as a front-page story in June of 2004. That story led to her book The House of Mondavi, published by Penguin’s Gotham Books in 2007. A New York Times bestseller, it was honored as a finalist both for a James Beard Award and a Gerald Loeb Award for distinguished reporting and is now in its twelfth printing. 

It is also currently under the option for a screen adaptation. Over the years, Ms. Siler wrote many feature stories for the Wall Street Journal out of its San Francisco bureau and helped produce WSJ.com videos to accompany some of these stories. Her critically acclaimed second book, Lost Kingdom, was also a New York Times bestseller. The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded Ms. Flynn Siler a “Public Scholar” fellowship for 2016-2017 to support her book, “The White Devil’s Daughters: The Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown.” 

The Northern California Independent Booksellers Association honored The White Devil’s Daughters with regional history and nonfiction awards. In June 2017, the Mayborn Graduate Institute of Journalism announced that Ms. Siler had been awarded a Mayborn Fellowship in Biography to support her new 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 dozens of nonfiction books and hundreds of articles and essays in major magazines, newspapers, and literary journals. She is also a longtime member of the San Francisco Writer’s Grotto. She has taught journalism at the University of London’s Birkbeck College and leads nonfiction workshops at the Community of Writers. 

She has appeared as a commentator on PBS, the BBC, CBS, CNBC, National Public Radio, and elsewhere. Her stories and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Alta Journal, and the Oxford Encyclopedia on Food and Drink in America. Her story for Alta, “The Safe Place That Became Unsafe,” won Folio’s Best Investigative Reporting prize in its 2021 Eddie and Ozzie awards.

Julia served two terms on the alumni board of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and currently serves on the boards of the San Francisco-based Litquake Foundation, which produces an annual literary festival and year-round events, and the Community of Writers. She was recently reelected to her third term on the Council of Friends of U.C. Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. In the fall of 2022, Julia joined an expedition that explored the Svalbard archipelago as part of the Arctic Circle residency program. 

In 2024-2025, she will be a Distinguished Careers Institute (DCI) Fellow at Stanford University. Ms. Siler was born in Palo Alto, California, in 1960. She and her family live in Northern California, where they love to mountain bike, hike, and row. They are frequent visitors to their local public libraries.