S200.
What We Talk about When We Talk about Food
Saturday, March 11, 2023
1:45 pm to 3:00 pm
Food writing can go beyond memories of grandma’s cooking or stinky lunch box scenes. Tastes, smells, and memory can tell stories about fraught families, multilayered cultural identities, and even geopolitics. These five Asian American writers weave meals and recipes into memoirs and creative nonfiction to illuminate personal and global histories. This panel discussion will explore the pitfalls of writing about food and offer advice about how to use culinary themes to tell deeper stories.
Participants
Grace Hwang Lynch is a journalist and essayist, whose work has been published by Tin House, Catapult, and NPR. The anthologies Lavanderia: A Mixed Load of Women, Wash and Word, and Mamas and Papas: On the Sublime and Heartbreaking Art of Parenting have included her work. She is writing a memoir.
Lisa Lee Herrick is a Hmong American writer and artist based in California. She is the editor at large of Hyphen magazine and cofounder of LitHop, and a 2021 PEN America Emerging Voices fellow with notable food essays in the Best American Food Writing 2020, and the Best American Essays 2020 and 2021.
Grace M. Cho is the author of Tastes Like War (Feminist Press), a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award and winner of the 2022 APALA award for nonfiction, and Haunting the Korean Diaspora (University of Minnesota Press, 2008). She is professor of sociology at College of Staten Island, CUNY.
Ella de Castro Baron
