Julie Salamon is an American author and journalist, who has been a film and television critic for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. She is the author of eleven books, for adults and children. Since 1999 she has been board chair of BRC, a NYC non-profit that provides housing, medical care, job training and social services to New Yorkers who have become homeless.
While in law school, Salamon was a summer intern at the Pittsburgh Press, and then at The Wall Street Journal, where she was hired as a reporter in the New York bureau upon graduation from NYU. Salamon became the Journalfilm critic in 1983, a job she held for 11 years. In 2000, she became a television critic and reporter for The New York Times, where she stayed until 2005. Salamon's journalism has also appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Harper's 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 a Kaiser Media Fellow for 2006–07. She was inducted into the Ohio Women's Hall of Fame in September 2008, and was a recipient of the . 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.
Novels
Salamon has written eleven books in many genres; in June 2019, her account of the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro, An Innocent Bystander, was published by Little, Brown. Her other books for adults include The Net of Dreams, Facing the Wind, and Rambam's Ladder. The Devil's Candy is considered a Hollywood classic about filmmaking gone awry, and her novella, The Christmas Tree, with illustrations by Jill Weber, 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 best-seller. With illustrator Jill Weber, she has written two books for middle-grade children, Mutts Promise and Cat in the City, both published by Dial.
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: University of Pennsylvania School of Law; the 92d Street Y; the Ivy League MIT and Stanford Conference for Corporate and Foundation Relation fundraisers; Health Care Leaders of New York; New York Academy of Medicine; and the national convention of Boys & 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, and 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. Salamon has been a mentor at Girls Write Now, a writing and mentoring program for New York City public high school girls, and is a board member of the American Jewish Historical Society.
Personal life
Salamon is married to Bill Abrams, who is executive director of , an organization aimed at breaking the cycle of extreme poverty. Salamon and Abrams have two children, Roxie and Eli, and live in downtown Manhattan with their dog Frankie.
