Gary Kamiya is a cofounder of Salon, a former executive editor of San Francisco magazine, and a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. He was born in Oakland, grew up in Berkeley, and has lived in San Francisco since 1971. His first book, Shadow Knights: The Secret War Against Hitler, was a critically acclaimed narrative history of Britain’s top-secret Special Operations Executive. Kamiya’s second book, Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco, was awarded the 2013 Northern California Book Award for Creative Nonfiction and has sold more than 50,000 copies. His local history column, Portals of the Past, runs every other Saturday in the San Francisco Chronicle, and Kamiya’s work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, ArtForum, Sports Illustrated, Mother Jones, and many other publications and has been widely anthologized, including in The Best African American Essays 2010, A New Literary History of America from Harvard University Press, and The Longman Reader. Kamiya is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Ron Ross Founder’s Award by the San Francisco History Association and the Redmond Kernan History Award from the Presidio Historical Association. He lives on Telegraph Hill.
