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Julia Keller is an American writer. She won a Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 2005. She was cultural critic for the Chicago Tribune when her first novel was published in 2012.
Her novels include Bitter River, the second in a mystery series featuring prosecutor Belfa "Bell" Elkins, a crusader against the illegal prescription drug trade thriving in rural America. The series is set in the fictional town of Acker's Gap, West Virginia, a "shabby afterthought" of a town, according to A Killing in the Hills, first in the series.
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 and remains its only win for feature writing.
Keller was born and raised in West Virginia. 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. She has taught at Princeton University, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Chicago.
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