Caitlin Liu comes from a long line of writers and fearless travelers. Her great-grandfather Juan Bardina Castara -- a war correpondent in France, professor in his native Spain and magazine editor in Chile -- published books on education reform and essays on politics. Among the volumes authored by her grandfather Yen-huai Liu was an account of his adventures across the Gobi Desert while on an expedition with a caravan of scientists and 250 camels.
While living in the low desert of Southern California, Caitlin penned and illustrated her first book at age 11. During college, she wandered into the newsroom of The Stanford Daily, where she became an editor. More than 1,000 of her articles have since appeared in such publications as The Los Angeles Times (where she was a staff writer from 1998 to 2006), The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Conde Nast Portfolio.com. Her specialties are law, business and public policy, fields she studied at the graduate level at Harvard University and U.C. Berkeley. Aside from the occasional celebrity brouhaha (like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan), Caitlin has written about hedge funds, Afghanistan, the economics of traffic congestion, jury reforms and sex offenders. In 2004, she was part of a large team at the Los Angeles Times that won a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news reporting. Her body of work also includes numerous feature stories as well as gavel-to-gavel trial reporting.
True to her DNA, Caitlin speaks fluent Mandarin Chinese and some Spanish. And she globe-trots as much as she can. So far, her journeys have landed her on five continents and more than 30 countries. (The exact count would depend on your geopolitical persuasion: Are China and Taiwan two nations, or just one?) For a glimpse into some of Caitlin's travel adventures, see her narratives on kayaking along the Great Barrier Reef of Belize, club-hopping in Berlin, the apres-ski scene at Whistler Village and hitchhiking through Santorini.
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