In The Physiology of Taste, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin is famous for writing, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.” In this four-session seminar we will read food memoirs: M.F.K Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me, Michael W. Twitty’s The Cooking Gene, Karen Babine’s All The Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer, and Kwame Onwuachi’s Notes from a Young Black Chef. In addition to discussing these books, we will explore our own food stories and memories through writing in an effort to understand how our relationship to food and certain culinary traditions have shaped who we have become.

Claire Jimenez is a Puerto Rican writer who grew up in Brooklyn and Staten Island, New York. She is the author of the short story collection Staten Island Stories, which won the Library's New York City Book Awards Hornblower Award for 2019. Jimenez is a PhD student in English with a concentration in ethnic studies and digital humanities at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She received her MFA from Vanderbilt University. Recently, she was a research fellow at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College. Currently, she is an assistant fiction editor at Prairie Schooner, and she has written for the Los Angeles Review of Books and many other publications.

This seminar meets on four Saturdays at 1:00 PM on the Zoom Meetings platform:
February 13 - M.F.K. Fisher, The Gastronomical Me
February 27 - Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene
March 13 - Karen Babine, All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer
March 27 - Kwame Onwuachi, Notes from a Young Black Chef

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