John T. Edge — The Penguin Press published his latest book, The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South, named a best book of 2017 by NPR, Publisher‘s Weekly, and a host of others. Now in paperback, Nashville selected the book as a citywide read for 2018.
Since 2018, he has hosted the television show TrueSouth, which airs on the SEC Network, ESPN, and Hulu.
Edge is a contributing editor at Garden & Gun. For twenty-two years he served as a columnist for the Oxford American. For three years he wrote the monthly “United Taste” column for the New York Times. His magazine and newspaper work has been featured in eleven editions of the Best Food Writing compilation. He has won four James Beard Foundation awards. In 2012 and 2020, he won Beard’s M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award.
Edge holds an MA in Southern Studies from the University of Mississippi. And an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Goucher College.
At the University of Mississippi, he directs the Mississippi Lab and serves the Writing & Rhetoric department as Writer-in-Residence. From 1999 through 2021, he served the Southern Foodways Alliance as director. Edge is a distinguished visiting professor in the MFA in Narrative Nonfiction program at the Grady College of the University of Georgia.
He has written or edited more than a dozen books, served as culinary curator for the weekend edition of NPR’s All Things Considered, and has been featured on dozens of television shows from CBS Sunday Morning to Iron Chef.
Edge lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his wife, Blair Hobbs, an acclaimed teacher and artist.