Jay Stuller has successfully straddled the worlds of corporate communication and mainstream journalism for more than three decades. Author of ten books and nearly a thousand national magazine articles in more than 155 publications — including features in Audubon, Smithsonian, Playboy, Travel & Leisure, Saturday Evening Post, Oceans, Success, Inc., Outside and Reader’s Digest — he also spent 25 years with Chevron, where he wrote the annual report, for the company’s worldwide magazine, and speeches for the Chairman of the Board.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Stuller was arguably one of the most widely published magazine writers in the country, and a frequent contributor to Writer’s Digest. Today, he often writes for NCGA Golf – look for the piece about the Hole-in-One and its consequences on pages 52 and 53 in the Spring 2017 edition, and a feature on the nine-hole Old Brockway course in Lake Tahoe, on pages 44 and 45 of the Summer 2017 edition – the Southern California Golf Association’s Fore magazine, and posts features on golf, equipment and travel for The A Position. For roughly two decades he’s been a member of the Golf Writers Association of America, and the California Golf Writers & Broadcasters Association.
Stuller’s human subjects ranged from OJ Simpson to Dr. Denton Cooley, Bill Walsh, Leslie Nielsen, Milton Friedman, Doug Harvey, General Jimmy Doolittle, Ricardo Montalbán, John Wooden, Charles Schwab, Bruce Jenner and Leo Buscaglia. (His first national cover story was for the November, 1978 issue of Sport magazine, on Simpson’s trade from Buffalo to the San Francisco 49ers.) With an exceptionally strong voice, he also wrote authoritative pieces on cultural trends, cardiac surgery, golf & travel, professional sports, Alcatraz, business, engineering, sports science, the histories of cleanliness and shaving and politics, while often focusing on natural history. Wrote Sea Frontiers Editor Bonnie Bilyeu Gordon, about a feature on coastal formation and erosion: “We were lucky to entice Jay Stuller to write about beaches for us. His style makes entertainment of science.”
Clearly familiar with a wide range of topics, Stuller is particularly knowledgeable about energy, from the exploration of crude oil to the refining and marketing of gasoline. During most of his 30 years with Shell Oil and Chevron Corporation, he traveled the world to write features about the companies’ people, technologies, operations and strategies. During Stuller’s last four years at Chevron he was promoted out of Corporate Public Affairs and into the position of Communications Manager at the Chevron Products Company. There he sat on the executive leadership team of a business unit with 26,000 employees and $8 billion of capital employed, an operation that included Refining, Marketing, Pipeline, Shipping and Aviation.
Also at Chevron, Stuller worked closely with the corporation’s past four Chairmen of the Board: George Keller, Kenneth Derr, David O’Reilly and John Watson. He’s also written for Archer Daniels Midland Chairman and CEO Patricia Woertz, and among other CEO’s, Motorola Chairman Emeritus Robert Galvin.
After taking an early retirement from Chevron, Stuller began working on an initiative to transform the electricity industry, both through technology and new regulations. He is co-author of the book, Perfect Power, published by McGraw Hill in 2008. Done in concert with the Galvin Electricity Initiative, it was the precursor of 2011′s An Electric Revolution. Stuller’s highly acclaimed book on the wine industry, Through the Grapevine, has been used as a text in Sonoma State University’s Graduate School of Business, and he is considered a skilled and knowledgeable observer of business and organizational management.
A Washington State native, Stuller spent two years at Pacific Lutheran University, where he played on the school’s basketball team. He served on a United State Forest Service trail crew in the Glacier Peak Wilderness area, and also fought several large forest fires. After relocating to San Francisco he graduated from Golden Gate University, with honors, and a degree in Political Science. For the summer of 1973, he was selected by Operation Crossroads Africa to live and work in a Nigerian village. Stuller lives in Marin County, California, with his wife, Susan Sutton.