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Jessica B. Harris is an award-winning food historian and one of the world’s leading experts on African Diaspora cooking. She’s the author of the memoir, My Soul Looks Back (Simon & Schuster, 2017), a finalist for the PEN/Open Book Award, about her days in Harlem in the Seventies, where her social circle included James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Nina Simone and other leading black intellectuals and artists of the time. Publisher’s Weekly raved, “This is a lively, entertaining, and informative recounting of a time and place that shaped and greatly enriched American culture.”

She is also the author of twelve critically acclaimed cookbooks documenting the foods and foodways of the African Diaspora, including Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons: Africa’s Gifts to New World Cooking, Sky Juice and Flying Fish Traditional Caribbean Cooking, The Welcome Table: African-American Heritage Cooking, The Africa Cookbook: Tastes of a Continent, and Beyond Gumbo: Creole Fusion Food from the Atlantic Rim. Harris also conceptualized and organized The Black Family Reunion Cookbook. Her book, High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America, was the International Association for Culinary Professionals 2012 prize winner for culinary history. Harris holds a PhD from NYU and lectures internationally.