Julie Salamon

Julie Salamon is an American journalist, critic and author.

She was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and raised in Seaman, a rural village located in Adams County, Ohio, where her father was the town doctor. After graduating from Tufts University, she moved to New York City, where she received her law degree from New York University. While in law school, she was a summer intern at the Pittsburgh Press and then the Wall Street Journal, where she was hired as a reporter in the New York bureau (covering commodities and then banking) upon graduation from NYU. Salamon became the Journal's film critic in 1983, a job she held for 11 years. In 2000, she became the television critic for the New York Times, and then a writer in the arts section until 2005.

Salamon has written a series of award-winning books, including Facing the Wind (2001), The Net of Dreams (1996), and Rambam’s Ladder (2003). The Devil’s Candy (1991) is considered a Hollywood classic about filmmaking gone awry, and her novella, The Christmas Tree, (1996) was a New York Times best-seller and has been translated into eight languages. Wendy and the Lost Boys, a biography of Pulitzer-prize winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein, was published by The Penguin Press on August 22, 2011 and became a New York Times bestseller. She is working on an illustrated novel for young readers with artist Jill Weber, to be published by Penguin's Dial Press for Young Readers in 2014. Her journalism has appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Bazaar, and The New Republic. She has been an adjunct professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and a lecturer at Columbia University. For her 2008 work Hospital she was chosen to be a Kaiser Media Fellow for 2006-2007. She was inducted into the Ohio Women's Hall of Fame in September 2008, and a recipient of the Ohioana Library Award. In the summer of 2010, she was a writing fellow at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire., where she completed Wendy and the Lost Boys.

For many years Salamon has been chair of the Brc, a social services organization in New York City that provides care for people who are homeless and may suffer from addiction or mental disease. She is a mentor at Girls Write Now, a writing and mentoring program for New York City public high school girls, and co-president (with Stephanie Kanarek) of The Village Temple. Salamon is married to Bill Abrams, who is executive director of TrickleUp, an organization aimed at breaking the cycle of extreme poverty. New York City is home; Salamon and Abrams live in downtown Manhattan with their two children, Roxie and Eli Salamon-Abrams, their dog Maggie and Kuro the cat.

Public speaking and appearances

She has been interviewed frequently on national and local television and radio programs, including National Public Radio, Good Morning America and the Today Show. She has been the keynote speaker for numerous conferences, often to audiences of several thousand people, but also in classrooms,boardrooms and libraries. A sampling of these organizations: the Ivy League MIT and Stanford Conference for Corporate and Foundation Relation fundraisers; Health Care Leaders of New York; New York Academy of Medicine; the national convention of Boys and Girls Clubs of America. She has lectured at hospitals and medical schools nationwide, including Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, Massachusetts General Cancer Center in Boston, Narrative Medicine Rounds at Columbia University Medical Center. She has spoken at dozens of UJA groups as well as churches, synagogues, universities, medical schools, book clubs and lower schools.

External links

• Julie Salamon official website
• Julie Salamon's articles for The New York Times
• "Julie Salamon: Growing Up in Ohio in the Shadow of the Holocaust", New York Times, May 22, 1996
• A film clip "The Open Mind - A Critical Mass (1988)" is available for viewing at the Internet Archive