Co-sponsoring: Michael Twitty

The Center is pleased to co-sponsor this event: Michael Twitty in Conversation with Marcie Cohen Ferris

Please note the following updates: 

START TIME: changed to 6:00PM

HYBRID EVENT: attend in person at UNC Stone Center or join online. Registration required only for remote option: south.unc.edu

At 6 p.m., Wednesday, April 19 , the Center for the Study of the American South will host our 2023 Hutchins Lecture: “Michael Twitty in Conversation with Marcie Cohen Ferris”, in the Sonja Haynes Stone Center auditorium. The event is free and open to the public. 

Michael Twitty, the 2018 recipient of two James Beard awards for his book The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South, will discuss his new publication, Kosher Soul: The Food and Faith Journey of an American Jew (HarperCollins, 2022), recently awarded Jewish Book of the Year by the National Jewish Book Awards.

Joining Twitty in this conversation will be Marcie Cohen Ferris, professor emerita in the Department of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, interim director of the Center for the Study of the American South, and author of Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South and The Edible South: The Power of Food and the Making of an American Region and Edible North Carolina: A Journey across a State of Flavor.

Be part of the conversation! Join us in person at the Sonya Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History, or attend virtually.

Visit south.unc.edu for details.

This event is co-sponsored by the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies, Department of American Studies, and NC Hillel.   

Michael W. Twitty is a culinary historian and food writer living in  Fredericksburg, Virginia. He blogs at Afroculinaria.com. He’s appeared on Bizarre Foods America with Andrew Zimmern, Many Rivers to Cross with Henry Louis Gates and most recently Taste the Nation with Top Chef’s Padma Lakshmi. HarperCollins released Twitty’s The Cooking Gene, in 2017, tracing his ancestry through food from Africa to America and from slavery to freedom, a finalist for The Kirkus Prize and The Art of Eating Prize and a 3rd place winner of Barnes & Noble’s Discover New Writer’s Awards in Nonfiction. The Cooking Gene won the 2018 James Beard Award for best writing as well as book of the year, making him the first Black author so awarded. His piece on visiting Ghana in Bon Appetit was included in Best Food Writing in 2019 and was nominated for a 2019 James Beard Award. His next book, Rice, a New York Times noted cookbook,  became available through UNC Press in 2021. KosherSoul, his follow-up to The Cooking Gene, was published in August 2022 through HarperCollins and received the 2022 National Jewish Book Award. Michael has a hit spice line based on The Cooking Gene and a recent special guest appearance on Michelle Obama’s Waffles and Mochi show on Netflix. Michael can also be found on MasterClass online, where he teaches Tracing Your Roots Through Food. Michael is a National Geographic Explorer, a TED fellow and a member of the 2022 TIME 100 Next class. He served as a historical consultant on the FX adaptation of Octavia Butler’s “Kindred.”