Daphne Larkin earned a Master’s Degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and wrote for the United Nations Press Office, United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and Newsweek magazine.   

After moving from Manhattan to the San Francisco Bay Area, she authored three coffee table books on wine, published stories in national magazines, including Parenting and Writer’s Digest (“Five-Minute Memoir”), and wrote for several California newspapers. She also worked as a Senior VP of Corporate Communications for Wells Fargo & Co. in San Francisco.

Larkin has taught magazine writing at Sonoma State University, was a Lecturer in Journalism at Pacific Union College, has been a Writer-in-Residence at Hedgebrook on Whidbey Island, Washington, a member of the Journalism Women’s Symposium (JAWS), and a patron and participant of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference.

In 1994, Larkin won the “Distinguished Service to Journalism Alumni Award” from Columbia University’s Journalism School for “pioneering children with disabilities” reporting in Parenting magazine, where she was a Contributing Editor and Columnist for nine years. Larkin tackled this subject when her son was born with a severe congenital defect.

Following her son’s death and the journalism award, several New York agents approached her for a memoir about Lucien’s short, but trailblazing life. After multiple rewrites over many years, she felt the memoir had served its healing purpose and put it to rest in 2018. But then a strange thing happened. After telling her story to her 2026 winter writers workshop, her students encouraged her to start again. And so she did.

In 2017, Larkin and her photojournalist husband, Chuck O’Rear, moved from Napa Valley, CA to Brevard, NC, where she teaches memoir writing at the Transylvania County Library, writes a column on that subject for The Transylvania Times, and leads writing workshops.