Hi! I’m Julia.
I wear many hats, but if you’re reading this, you’re probably interested in my writing, my culinary education + consulting work, or my coaching work for creatives.
My overall approach to life and work basically involves sitting at the intersection of all my interests and experiences, asking “how can these come together?” rather than “which one should I pick?”
That approach has yielded some pretty incredible results, from founding a culinary education business and writing an award-winning book, to helping writers I respect and admire create their own masterpieces, and even running multi-day fermentation residencies and pop-ups (preferably in the woods).
I write, I cook, I eat, and I help other writers, every single day, and I absolutely love it.
To learn more about my work, peek the tabs at the top of your screen or click below to:
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Want to know more about me and how I got to where I am (and who I am)? Read on!
My Story
I grew up in Boulder, CO a few minutes from the flatirons, and spent my childhood running up and down mountains, making art, and generally enjoying all that the natural world out west had to offer. I was never without a sketchbook and pencil in hand and that, along with my love of nature, animals, and my experience traveling with my family, formed a lot of the basis for who I am today.
Even from a young age, I was seeking out things to be inspired by and to delight in, and opportunities to express myself creatively. The result was a child (and later, adult) with lots of creative interests, a deep well of creative energy, and deep love for the world around her.
Bus driving, psychology, and art
I moved to Iowa, initially for art school but, becoming quickly disenchanted by most of my coursework, opted instead to study Psychology. I focused on social psychology and the study of loss and trauma, in part to understand some of the more traumatic events that shaped my early life (and didn’t make it into this glowing autobiography).
Studying psychology was fascinating, and I was amazed by the incredible capacity we have for healing and growth, and the ways in which our mindsets and daily actions can help shift us towards a new lived reality.
Those realizations have served much of my work since: Including my perspective that we are active participants in the future, and our daily choices (like with the food we make, and the stories we preserve) are a part of our history making efforts. My belief in our active creative potential is part of why I founded the Culinary Curiosity School.
It’s also why much of my work with creatives includes gentle nudges towards mindset shifts plus skill-building, rather than skill-building alone.
During this time (and for years after) I also drove buses for Cambus, a public transit outfit operated by the University of Iowa. Driving buses is a great way to connect with the incredible variety of folks who make up a community.
It also teaches you patience (lots), but the act of driving a bus is also meditative: You have to be in the present moment, of course, but attending to each small thing in that moment. I’ve brought that same meditative feeling into my meditation and mindfulness work today, teaching others to appreciate those small, seemingly unimportant (but actually very important!) moments as they go about their days or travel between A and B.
During this time, too, I started fermenting, gardening, and canning (or rather, started when I was 19 or 20): These were purely subsistence efforts and later hobbies when I started. Little did I know that they would become the center of so much of my world two decades on.
Welcome to Libraryland
After my undergraduate work, I became an assistant manager at a coffeehouse and bakery, which was work I enjoyed and built on a variety of previous jobs in food service.
I applied to about a dozen PhD programs in Psychology and was summarily rejected from all but one, which also ended up rejecting me in the end because the transcripts I sent them got lost in the mail.
Dejected, I settled into the rhythms of my new life at the cafe: working evenings, going to the bar or a show, waking up and gardening and reading, then heading back to work. It wasn’t a terrible rhythm, all things considered, but I didn’t want it to be my only one.
At the suggestion of my friend Justin, I applied to a Library Science graduate program. Or, specifically, the joint program with the Center for the Book (which focuses on book art and book history), with an eye towards working in archives and rare books.
When the letter came, I assumed it was another rejection but much to my joy, I got in, and began to walk down a beautiful, unexpected career path. I adored my coursework (or most of it), I loved the job I got at the State Historical Society of Iowa, caring for everything from historical records from Quaker families in Iowa, to Civil War diaries, to documentation on the Underground Railroad. In my book history courses, I worked with medieval manuscripts and historic cookbooks.
I was awash in the pleasure of learning and the pleasure of engaging with, and critically studying, historic objects, and studying information generally. I felt intellectually stimulated in new ways, I had the chance to co-create and run a student led journal (B Sides), and learned concepts (like traces of use) that filled me with a sense of wonder and impact my approach to research to this day.
My Master’s thesis (which ended up being a poster presentation: That’s a long story), was on Iowa libraries during World War I. It ended up being almost 300 pages, and was my first deep dive historical project. I drove around the state, looking at libraries’ administrative records and newspaper clippings, reconstructing the story of what it was like to serve a community during tumultuous times, and during times where librarians did things they probably later regretted (like censoring and in a couple cases even burning German language books).
My final project for the Center for the Book, Modernizing Markham, was a creative book art/culinary project based on a 1615 cookbook, and later morphed into my first book, published by a dear friend’s imprint, Candle Light Press.
The Center for the Book always felt aspirational: Something I thought was so cool but never thought I would be able to do. And studying historic cookbooks (and history in general) felt the same. My Master’s program taught me that the aspirational was possible: That the big dreams that felt out of reach could actually come to pass. And that fact is one I continue to be amazed by, each and every time it happens.
I also fell in love with working with historic materials, and with the incredible insights we gain about ourselves and how we eat by looking to the past. That little project was the catapult to so much of my life as it is today: But it would take me a few years to realize it.
Dr. Julia Skinner
I graduated from the joint Library Science/Center for the Book Master’s program at University of Iowa, then immediately jumped into my PhD in Library and Information Science from Florida State University.
I still made food (and lots of it) as a hobby: Mostly for myself, though I did once cater a 150 person wedding solo out of my rental house’s kitchen. I do not recommend trying that.
But in my scholarly life, I focused on change: Mostly in historical contexts, but also by looking at how people describe and navigate political movements and natural disasters on social media. This was the time of the Occupy movement and, simultaneously, the rise of various right wing perspectives. Studying political discourse on social media was fascinating, and I was challenged in new ways as I described what I saw online while staying neutral in that retelling.
While my social media research remains my most heavily cited, alongside my research on loss and trauma, it was my historical work that really captured my heart.
For my dissertation, I studied the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library during the Harlem Renaissance through World War II: Looking at the ways the institution supported (and didn’t support) the community, and how the institution navigated internal change and larger changes outside its walls.
I adored deep diving into the history, as I always do, and watching the stories of people and places unfold the more I dove in. But I also used this moment to build, and test, theories: My own theory around how institutions navigate internal and external change (appropriately called CHI, Change in Historic Institutions), and a collaborative project to test a theoretical codebook for Information Worlds (which remains one of my very favorite theories).
Dissertations are often decidedly un-collaborative ventures, where one person and one person alone conducts the research and presents their findings. So having a solo project that also included a collaborative component was a wonderful balance between my own deep work, and my desire to learn and create alongside others. In this case, each of us used the data (or in my case, historical records) from our dissertations, and used it to develop and test a theoretical framework and, ultimately, a codebook that could be applied across a variety of research methods.
If that’s the kind of thing that lights you up, learn more here or here.
Doing my PhD made me capable of rigorous, deep research: But doing my PhD the way I did meant that I could conduct such research in multiple contexts, and rely on interdisciplinarity rather than sticking in the silo of one field. This work also deepened my appreciation of the symbiotic dance between theory and practice: Something I started to explore during my Master’s program and something that informs my work today. Theory undergirds practice, practice informs and refines theory, giving us both a why and a how that are intentional and directional.
This moment also deepened my lifelong love of traveling (and particularly, traveling as part of my work), as I slept on friend’s couches and spent long, exhausted days in archives, splitting my time equally between my apartment in Tallahassee and couch surfing across New York City.
I graduated with my doctorate in 2015 and, as a bit of deja vu to my first attempt at a PhD, was summarily rejected from every faculty job I applied for. In this case, it was a matter of a huge applicant pool and just a few jobs, and it meant I had a choice: I could keep trying for faculty jobs, or I could open myself up to the many other kinds of work I was qualified for.
Atlanta, Ireland + my magical culinary, creative life today
The job I accepted was as a Rare Books Curator, essentially a director role for a rare book collection that encompassed everything from acquisitions to exhibit design to programming (among other things). I moved to Atlanta and started to endure 3-4 hours/day of commuting to the suburbs.
But when it came to the collection itself, I was thrilled: And during my time there I built up a culinary collection (including a 1600s printing of Markham that I still pine for), created several exhibits, and introduced new programming. I loved the collection and loved the work, and while the organization itself wasn’t for me, that experience built on what I learned from the Center for the Book: That my big dream ideas (like working with food history for a living) were not only possible, but actually interesting to other people.
In 2018, I quit that job without having another lined up, and suddenly realized that, without a job or school to conform my days to, I had a unique opportunity to decide what work really meant to me: And the kind of work I was meant to do. I wanted to work with food, and I wanted to do more research. And so Root was born.
This was also the year I had my weeklong residency with Sandor Katz, which ended up being a life-changing experience: I had studied food history. I loved fermentation. But suddenly, the two clicked together.
I folded more fermentation writing and education into my work, and suddenly came up with the idea for Our Fermented Lives. I was so blessed to be taken on by the first agent I approached with the proposal, The Ekus Group, who I still work with today.
From there, things really started to fall into place: I began writing for more magazines and websites, I wrote more books, and when I craved a project between projects, I even wrote, illustrated, and self-published my own oracle deck.
On the side, I began coaching academic writers, and in 2023, made the leap to founding my own coaching organization, Roots + Branches, with the goal of helping my fellow creatives build sustainable, productive creative practices that center pleasure and celebration as much as they center progress. This is the culmination of a lot of reflection on my own work habits, and my efforts to unweave and reweave how I work, but also everything I’ve seen in working with other writers.
I want to help more people put their most important, needed work out in the world, but I also want to be at the forefront of the revolutionary thinking I would love to see more broadly: That work doesn’t have to be the kind of “work” (toxic, boring, grind culture stuff) we know under capitalism. Even the kind of boring and hard stuff can have an element of pleasure and fun.
After years and years of being functionally in the closet, I also strive to create spaces where people can just unapologetically be themselves, experiment, and explore: And where they allow their true self to shine through in their creative work.
It can be unnerving and scary to be honest about who we are, says this Queer kid who was raised in a toxic religious environment, but it’s also crucial to do so, particularly as we find our communities and spaces where we’re actually safe(r) in expressing ourselves. Letting ourselves relax, and breathe, and ask how those stigmatized parts of ourselves actually shape our work, can lead to some beautiful things. And can mean we feel like we’re honoring our whole selves on the page (or in whatever medium we create).
I view my current work as an interweaving of two threads: My culinary research, teaching + food writing life, and my support for other writers (and all creatives) on the other. Each one informs the other, and continues to grow in beautiful, unexpected ways.
I want us to center pleasure, curiosity, and magic as much as we center expertise, deep research, and scientific inquiry: recognizing that the two actually enhance each other.
My goal in ten years is to regularly host retreats + events that combine creativity in various forms, in both Ireland and the US. I view this as an opportunity to create the kind of space Sandor created for me and the friends I made at his home: And I hope to have two dedicated spaces of my own from which to do this work.
The Culinary Curiosity School, founded in 2024, continues to offer unique food-centered classes that go beyond skill-building to cultivate a sense of magic and wonder.
Roots + Branches is my space for supporting other creatives, whatever their path and whatever they’re making, helping them realize their own creative dreams and helping them actually dedicate time and energy to their work in a way that’s pleasurable, fulfilling, and that redefines what “work” can be.
Root continues to be my home base for running events and doing consulting: Which I offer for everyone from filmmakers (ever wondered what foods you’d put in an apocalyptic kitchen?), to novelists, to museum directors and researchers. It’s such a wonderful culmination of all my talents and my work in in-between, interdisciplinary spaces to be able to support so many wonderful, creative people in realizing their work.
And, always, I continue to do my own creative work: Writing books, writing articles (but mostly books), and creating however else I feel led to. My own writing practice comes first each day, before I even look at email or think about rote business tasks.
I will always be a writer, and a creator, a cook, and a researcher, first and foremost, and my passion for my own craft is the secret sauce to why I’m so well-positioned to be of service to others in the various ways I am.
Whatever brought you here today (and especially if you read that long novel of a life story!) welcome, and I’m so glad you’ve found me.
Make sure to check out my writing, the various ways to work with me, or Root, the Culinary Curiosity School, and Roots + Branches, if you want to see the different ways we could collaborate or if you want to learn more about my work.
Or, just drop me a line, and let’s make some magic together.
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Julia C. Skinner 