Programming Ideas for August 2024

Good Reads and Summer Eats

What’s on your menu this August? The Authors Unbound team will be kicking back and unwinding with some delicious books – and snacks. Each of these authors explores various cuisines and the histories and cultures they came from.
Take a look at these creative and mouthwatering books – a mix of recipes, poetry and prose.
Crystal Wilkinson, a recent fellowship recipient of the Academy of American Poets, is the award-winning author of Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, a culinary memoir, Perfect Black, a collection of poems, and three works of fiction—The Birds of Opulence, Water Street and Blackberries, Blackberries. She is the recipient of an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry, an O. Henry Prize, a USA Artists Fellowship, and an Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. She currently teaches at the University of Kentucky where she is Bush-Holbrook Professor in Creative Writing.
 
Mallory O’Meara is an award winning and best-selling author. Her first book, The Lady From The Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick, is a Los Angeles Times bestseller. It won the 2019 SCIBA Award for Biography, the Rondo 2019 Book of the Year and was nominated for the Hugo and Locus awards. Her second book, Girly Drinks: A World History of Women and Alcohol won a 2022 James Beard Award and was nominated for a Spirited Award.
Hank Shaw is an award-winning author and chef who has written five cookbooks on wild foods, including fish, game and edible wild plants. He runs the website Hunter Angler Gardener Cook, the internet’s largest source of wild foods recipes. He is recognized as one of the nation’s leading experts on wild foods, and is among the foremost wild game chefs in North America: His work has been quoted in such publications as the New York Times, the Washington Post, Food & Wine, Field & Stream, Bon Appetit, as well as on CNN and the Travel Channel.
Edward Lee is the Chef/Owner of 610 Magnolia and Whiskey Dry in Louisville, Khora in Cincinnati, and the Culinary Director for Succotash Prime in DC and Succotash in National Harbor. He is also the Co-Founder and Creative Director for The LEE Initiative, a non-profit dedicated to diversity and equality in the restaurant industry. Chef Lee was the recipient of the 2019 James Beard Foundation Award for his book, Buttermilk Graffiti: A Chef’s Journey to Discover America’s New Melting Pot Cuisine. His first book, Smoke & Pickles (Artisan Books, May 2013) was a national bestseller. Chef Lee appears frequently in print and television and his writing has been featured in The New York Times, Esquire, Food & Wine and many other national publications.
 

Mariah Gladstone is founder and CEO of Indigikitchen. A portmanteau of Indigenous, digital, and kitchen, Indigikitchen is an online cooking show dedicated to re-indigenizing our diets using digital media. Using foods native to their Americas, Indigikitchen gives viewers the important tools they need to find and prepare food in their own communities. Beyond that, it strengthens the ties to our cultures and reminds us of the inherent worth of our identities while fueling our physical bodies. Indigenous food systems support healthier ecosystems, bodies, and families.