My passion for food and literature naturally guided me towards a career in food editing and media. Food and books are two objects that have been instrumental in my life, especially in finding an abundance of beauty and meaning in the world.

I grew up in a small town in the Midwest called Peculiar, in the state of Missouri. I dropped out of college when I was twenty to attend culinary school and spent the first half of my twenties working in kitchens and doing other odd culinary jobs.

Always drawn to questions about meaning, beauty, and justice I returned to school and completed a BA in philosophy in 2018, then an MA in gastronomy (food studies) in 2021 where I explored food through a feminist-philosophical lens. I was curious to understand how foodways reinforce traditional gender roles and other social hierarchies like race and class. Peering into the lives and works of iconic twentieth-century women writers, including M.F.K. Fisher, Gertrude Stein, and Elizabeth David, I studied queerness and resistance while questioning whether the pleasure of tasting an apricot tart is in fact more pleasurable than a perfectly rendered sentence about one.

These days my focus has turned to learning how national and global food systems work in order to work towards a more sustainable and just future.

My favorite novel is (currently) Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, though Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin is a close contender. My favorite cookbook is Thalia Ho’s Wild Sweetness, and I strongly urge you to read Wallace Stevens' "Sunday Morning," my favorite poem, if you haven’t already.