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, Hollywood’s first Asian American movie star, published by Dutton in the US and Faber in the UK. The Times of London called the book, “[A] splendidly entertaining biography . . . Not Your China Doll is an intelligent study, acutely sympathetic to Wong.” Library Journal gave it a starred review, stating, “This compelling account of Anna May Wong’s life and career as a film star is hard to put down.” And according to Anne Helen Petersen, “It’s really fucking good.” The book was nominated for the 2024 Goodreads Choice Awards in History & Biography.

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.

In 2021, I was a 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.

I have worked in-house and independently in book publishing for more than 15 years, editing books published by HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Amazon Publishing, and Audible, including The Baddest Bitch in the Room by Sophia Chang, Who Gets In and Why by Jeffrey Selingo, Why We Can’t Sleep by Ada Calhoun, The Lost Tribe of Coney Island by Claire Prentice, and For a Song and a Hundred Songs by Liao Yiwu. I also work collaboratively with authors, such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Maria Hinojosa on her adult and YA memoir Once I Was You and Georgetown professor Dorothy A. Brown on her forthcoming book about reparations. I ghostwrote the book This Is How We Rise by Claudia Chan, which the New York Times noted “tells women how they can harness their femaleness for success.” In 2015, I relaunched Book of the Month as an online box subscription service for books.

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 and Irish, and a 5th-generation Chinese American. In another life I wrote about Chinatown, a place I used to live. I am currently serving as board president of the Stanford Asian Pacific American Alumni Club (SAPAAC).

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.