Julia Cooke's reporting has been published in Condé Nast Traveler, The New York Times, Playboy, The Village Voice, The Atavist, Saveur, and more. Her essays have been published in A Public Space, Salon, The Threepenny Review, Smithsonian, Tin House, and Virginia Quarterly Review, where she is a contributing editor. She was a finalist for a 2014 Livingston Award in International Reporting for her profile of a young Cuban sex worker; her article about the blossoming of architecture and design in Havana won a 2016 New York Press Club Award. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Travel Writing 2014, Best Women's Travel Writing (Volume 9), One World, Many Cultures (10th edition), and noted in various iterations of Best American Essays and Best American Travel Writing.
She's written about translating for a Guatemalan asylum-seeker and about the Vermont women working toward more nuanced conversations about the second amendment, profiled the most prolific design writer in the U.S. and Mexico City's best-known contemporary artist, and considered why American TV watchers love female spies. Julia is the recipient of fellowships from The Norman Mailer Center, The Constance Saltonstall Foundation, and Columbia University, and holds an undergraduate degree from Georgetown University and an MFA from Columbia University. She has given keynote lectures at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum and the New York State Council for the Social Studies.
Her third book, Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World—about the intertwined lives of the restless, pioneering foreign correspondents Rebecca West, Emily Hahn, and Martha Gellhorn—is forthcoming in February of 2026 from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Her second book, Come Fly The World (2021, Mariner/Icon)—“A unique and compassionate portrait of barrier-breaking women in the 1960s and ’70s” (Publisher’s Weekly) and “A fascinating history of a bygone era” (People)—was a Goodreads Readers Choice Award finalist, named to best-of lists from Newsweek, Fortune, People, the New York Observer, Apple, Amazon; selected for inclusion in Malala Yousafzai's book club; and inspiration for the PBS American Experience documentary, “Fly With Me.”. Her first book, The Other Side of Paradise: Life in the New Cuba, published in 2014, was a collection of “wonderful vignettes covering the daily lives of Cubans in which their hopes, dreams, and frustrations are revealed" (Booklist).
