Julia Keller is a cultural critic and reporter at the Chicago Tribune. She joined the paper in late 1998.

Keller was born and raised in Huntington, West Virgina. She earned a bachelor's and master's degree in English at Marshall University, and a doctoral degree in English at Ohio State University. Her dissertation explored literary biography.

She began her journalism career as a reporting intern for syndicated columnist Jack Anderson in Washington, DC. Later she worked for the Ashland Daily Independent in Ashland, Kentucky and the Columbus Dispatch in Columbus, Ohio.

Keller was a 1998 Nieman fellow at Harvard University where she studied the history of literacy. She lives in Chicago.