Julie Salamon

Early life

The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Lilly (born Rapaport) and Alexander Salamon, she was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and raised with her sister Suzanne in Seaman, a rural village located in Adams County, Ohio, where her father was the town doctor. After graduating from Tufts University in Boston, Salamon moved to New York City, where she received her law degree from New York University.

Journalism

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 (covering commodities and then banking) upon graduation from NYU. Salamon became the Journal's film 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 Ohioana Library Award. 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 ten books in many genres; in March, 2016, her middle grade children's novel "Mutt's Promise," illustrated by Jill Weber, was published by Dial Press for Young Readers. In September 2014, her middle grade children's novel Cat in the City, illustrated by Jill Weber, was published by Dial. Her other books include The Net of Dreams (1996), Facing the Wind (2001), and Rambam's Ladder (2003). The Devil's Candy (1991) is considered a Hollywood classic about filmmaking gone awry, and her novella, The Christmas Tree (1996), 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.

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: 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.

For many years, Salamon has been chair of the Bowery Residents' Committee, a social services organization in New York City that provides care for people who are homeless and may suffer from addiction or mental disease. She has been a mentor at Girls Write Now, a writing and mentoring program for New York City public high school girls, and is co-president (with Jerry Arbittier) of The Village Temple.

Personal life

Salamon is married to Bill Abrams, who is executive director of TrickleUp, an organization aimed at breaking the cycle of extreme poverty. Salamon and Abrams have two children, Roxie and Eli, and live in downtown Manhattan.