Julia Keller

Julia Keller is an American writer and former journalist. Her awards include the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing.

Life Keller was born in Huntington, West Virginia and lived there throughout her early life. Her father was a mathematics professor who taught at Marshall University. She graduated from Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, and earned a doctoral degree in English literature from Ohio State University. Her master's thesis was an analysis of the Henry Roth novel, Call It Sleep. Her doctoral dissertation explored multiple biographies of Virginia Woolf (A poetics of literary biography: The creation of "Virginia Woolf", Ohio State, 1996). She currently lives in both Chicago and rural Ohio.

Keller won the annual Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her three-part narrative account of the deadly Utica, Illinois tornado outbreak, published by the Chicago Tribune in April 2004. The jury called it a "gripping, meticulously reconstructed account of a deadly 10-second tornado". The Tribune has won many Pulitzers but Keller's prize was its first win for feature writing.

In 2008, Keller wrote a nonfiction book that detailed the cultural impact of the Gatling gun. In 2012, she started publishing a series of mysteries, The Bell Elkins Mysteries, that details a woman's return to Appalachia and the mysteries that abound in her home town. The first book in the series. starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Kirkus, and Booklist. It was also a winner of the Barry Award for Best First Mystery.

Books

Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel: The Gun That Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genius Who Invented It (Viking, 2008) Back Home (Egmont, 2009), named by Booklist as one of the top ten YA debut novels of the year

Bell Elkins mysteries A Killing in the Hills (Minotaur, 2012); Bitter River (Minotaur, 2013) Summer of the Dead (Minotaur, 2014) Last Ragged Breath (Minotaur, 2015) Sorrow Road (Minotaur, 2016) Fast Falls the Night (Minotaur, 2017) Bone on Bone (Minotaur, 2018) The Cold Way Home (Minotaur, 2019)

Bell Elkins e-novellas The Devil's Stepdaughter (Minotaur, 2014) A Haunting of the Bones (Minotaur, 2014) Ghost Roll (Minotaur, 2015) Evening Street (Minotaur, 2015)

The Dark Intercept The Dark Intercept (Tor Teen, 2017) Dark Mind Rising (Tor Teen, 2018) Dark Star Calling (Tor Teen, 2019)