[close] Julia Flynn Siler is the author of The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty, published by Penguin’s Gotham Books in June, 2007.

A graduate of Brown University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Ms. Flynn Siler began her career as a staff correspondent for BusinessWeek, working in the magazine’s Los Angeles and Chicago bureaus. She wrote about Midwestern businesses for The New York Times and earned an MBA at night from Northwestern’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management.

In 1993, she won a fellowship to teach business journalism in Prague. Based out of the Center for Independent Journalism, a not-for-profit organization supported, in part, by The New York Times Foundation, Ms. Flynn Siler then went on to serve as a London-based foreign correspondent, first for BusinessWeek and then for The Wall Street Journal. She wrote about everything from Dolly the cloned sheep to Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Airways.

In 2000, she moved back to the U.S. to join a family business in San Francisco and raise her two young sons. After a few years, Ms. Flynn Siler returned to writing for The Wall Street Journal. One of her first stories was about the turmoil within the Mondavi family’s wine empire, which ran as a front page story in June of 2004.

That story led to her book The House of Mondavi, which involved more than 500 hours of interviews and examination of tens of thousands of pages of documents. Ms. Flynn Siler is a member of Investigative Reporters and Editors and continues to write for The Wall Street Journal out of its San Francisco bureau, focusing on family businesses, wine, and philanthropy.

Ms. Flynn Siler is also a member of the San Francisco-based writing collective North 24th. The group’s members have four books scheduled to be published in 2007-2008. She is involved in a wide range of community volunteer activities. She and her husband have two sons and live in Northern California. [close]