Julia Cooke's essays and reporting have appeared in A Public Space, Salon, Tin House, Smithsonian, Best American Travel Writing, and Virginia Quarterly Review, where she is a contributing editor. She is the author of The Other Side of Paradise: Life in the New Cuba (Seal Press, 2014), narrative nonfiction on youth culture in post-Fidel Havana; and Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am (Houghton Mifflin, March 2021), a nonfiction account of the lives of international stewardesses of the 1960s and 70s.