photo by Jmar Teran

photo by Jmar Teran

About

I'm Katie, a writer and photographer based in Brooklyn. My work has appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Believer, the Asian American Writers' Workshop, and elsewhere. I’m the author of Not Your China Doll, a new biography of Anna May Wong published by Dutton in the U.S. and Faber in the UK. I also write the Substack newsletter Half-Caste Woman, which explores topics related to Anna May Wong, race and representation in Hollywood, and other interesting nuggets of forgotten history. Subscribe here to receive future issues.

Most recently, I was a 2021 finalist for the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship program. As a Spring 2017 TED Resident, I gave a TED Talk titled "As American as Chop Suey" about my photojournalism project on Chinese restaurant workers in New York. The photos and stories of these workers are collected in the exhibition Thank You Enjoy, which began touring the US in 2018.

In 2016, I contributed to the documentary project She Is Syria, which chronicles the stories of women and girl refugees. Previously, I edited award-winning books for Amazon Publishing and HarperCollins. I relaunched Book of the Month as a box subscription service for books in 2015. I also co-founded and served as editor in chief of William & Park, a digital magazine for creatives. 

A California transplant, I suffer from chronic wanderlust and an inexplicable need to collect cute things that don't fit in my apartment. I’m Chinese, Irish, and English, and a 5th-generation Chinese American. In another life I wrote about Chinatown, a place I used to live. 

Drop me a line at kayteesal [at] gmail [dot] com.

short bio

Katie Gee Salisbury is the author of Not Your China Doll, a new biography of Anna May Wong, the first Asian American movie star. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Believer, the Asian American Writers' Workshop, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship in 2021 and gave the TED Talk “As American as Chop Suey.” She also writes the newsletter Half-Caste Woman. A fifth-generation Chinese American who hails from Southern California, she now lives in Brooklyn.