Chip Jacobs Email & Phone Number

Chip Jacobs is a bestselling author and prize-winning journalist. His forthcoming novel, "Later Days," his follow-up to "Arroyo," his Los Angeles Times bestselling fiction debut, will be published in late summer 2025. On the narrative, nonfiction side, Jacobs wrote the acclaimed true-crime tale "The Darkest Glare," and the biography "Strange As It Seems," an Indies Book of the Year finalist. He is also the co-author, with William J. Kelly, of two environmental social histories: the international bestselling Smogtown and its sequel, "The People's Republic of Chemicals." He has contributed pieces to anthologies, among them the bestselling "Los Angeles in the 1970s: Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine." Jacobs' reporting has appeared in the L.A. Times, L.A. Daily News, CNN, The New York Times, Bloomberg, L.A Weekly, and elsewhere. Among other recognition, he has won seven Los Angeles Press Club Awards. He is currently at work on a history of the Long Beach Freeway (710) Extension, the planet's longest, fiercest, and arguably most entertaining freeway battle, and several Hollywood projects. Jacobs, a graduate of the University of Southern California, garage-band guitarist, and Beatles fanatic, lives in the L.A. area.

Listed skills include Storytelling, Books, Journalism, Newspapers, and 18 others.

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  Author & Journalist

  Rare Bird Books Llc

  Jan 1996 - Present

  Chip Jacobs is a bestselling author and journalist. His latest book is the tragicomic, true crime caper The Darkest Glare: A True Story of Murder, Blackmail and Real Estate Greed in 1979 Los Angeles, which Kirkus Review praised as "engrossingly bizarre" and "entertaining." Jacobs' previous book was his debut novel, Arroyo, historical fiction set around construction of Pasadena's mysterious Colorado Street Bridge in 1913. It was a Los Angeles Times bestseller, Southern California Independent Bookseller Association bestseller, and a CrimeReads most anticipated book; it medaled at the Independent Book Publishers Awards. Besides them, he has penned the biography Strange As It Seems: the Impossible Life of Gordon Zahler (an Indies Book of the Year finalist) and the environmental social histories The People's Republic of Chemicals and the international bestselling Smogtown: the Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles (the latter two with William J. Kelly). He has also contributed pieces to anthologies, among them the bestselling Los Angeles in the 1970s: Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine. His prize-winning reporting has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, L.A. Daily News, CNN, The New York Times, Bloomberg, L.A Weekly, among others. He is currently partnering with WarnerMedia to develop Smogtown into an entertainment project, as well as on a follow-up novel and a non-fiction project. Visit www.chipjacobs.com to learn more.