Julia Reed is a contributing editor for NEWSWEEK and will begin writing a food column for the magazine in November 2007. She started at NEWSWEEK in 1978 as an intern at the magazine's Washington bureau while attending Georgetown University. She worked for the Orlando Sentinel as a business reporter and got her start covering campaigns in 1988, when she worked at U.S. News & World Report.

For the past 20 years she has been a writer at Vogue, in charge of the magazine's political coverage. She has written profiles of Al Gore, George W. Bush and, most recently, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Elizabeth Edwards. She also writes for the New York Times and London's "The Spectator" and appears regularly on MSNBC and CNN.

Since 2005 Reed has lived in New Orleans full-time and contributed to NEWSWEEK's coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina with first-person accounts of the devastation of the city. 

Reed wrote the food column for the New York Times magazine from 2001 to 2004 and has collected those columns in a forthcoming book for St. Martin's Press, scheduled for publication in 2008. A collection of her essays about the South, "Queen of the Turtle Derby and Other Southern Phenomena" was published by Random House in 2004. Her book "The House on First Street" will be published by Harper Collins/Ecco in 2008.