Julia Keller is an American writer. She won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her account of the deadly April 2004 Utica, Illinois tornado outbreak, which was published in the Chicago Tribune, where Keller works as cultural critic. The newspaper has won many Pulitzer Prizes, but Keller's award was the first -- and thus far, the only -- time that the Tribune has won a Pulitzer in the feature writing category.
She has taught at Princeton University, Ohio State University and the University of Notre Dame, and has published two books. One is a cultural history of the 19th century, seen through the prism of the Gatling Gun and the life of inventor and businessman Richard Jordan Gatling; and a novel for young adults, narrated by a 13-year-old girl whose father suffers a traumatic brain injury while serving with the United States Armed Forces in Iraq.
Born and raised in Huntington, West Virginia, Keller earned bachelor's and master's degrees in English from Marshall University and 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 developed a poetics of literary biography by contrasting multiple biographies of Virginia Woolf.
Keller was a 1998 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, where she studied technologies of literacy.
Her non-fiction book Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel: The Gun That Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genius Who Invented It, which details the cultural impact of the Gatling gun, was published by Viking Press in 2008. The paperback edition was published by Penguin in 2009.
Her novel Back Home was published by Egmont in September 2009. It was named by Booklist as one of the Top 10 first novels of the year for young adults.