Michael Twitty

Michael W. Twitty is a noted culinary and cultural historian who recreates the American slave experience through food and its preparation. He created Afroculinaria, the first blog devoted to African American historic foodways and their legacy, and was honored by First We Feast.com as one of twenty greatest food bloggers of all time. He has appeared on Bizarre Foods America with Andrew Zimmern, Many Rivers to Cross with Dr. Henry Louis Gates, and has lectured to more than 250 groups including at Yale, Oxford and Carnegie Mellon Universities, Colonial Williamsburg, and the Smithsonian Folklore Festival. Michael has been invited to speak around the world, from the MAD Symposium in Copenhagen to the Guardian Festival of Ideas in London to film festivals in Jerusalem, all on culinary justice and the African American impact on Southern foodways. His work has been featured in many publications and websites Ebony, the Guardian, Eater.com and NPR’s Codeswitch blog. He has appeared on NPR on a number of occasions including being interviewed on the acclaimed food program, The Splendid Table. He has also served as a judge for the James Beard Awards and is a Smith fellow with the Southern Foodways Alliance. He was recently named one of "Fifty People Changing the South" by Southern Living and one of the "Five Cheftavists to Watch" by TakePart.Com. HarperCollins will release Twitty’s first major book in 2016: The Cooking Gene, which traces his ancestry through food from Africa to America and slavery to freedom. And most recently he is a TED Fellow, who spoke at #TED2016 https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/his-paula-deen-takedown-went-viral-but-this-food-scholar-has-more-on-his-mind/2016/02/12/f83900f8-d031-11e5-88cd-753e80cd29ad_story.html