About Me:
I am a food journalist, but have also written about travel, design, extreme sports, photography, and art. These stories have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Magazine, Chicago Tribune SUNDAY Magazine, and other publications.
My book Fried Walleye and Cherry Pie: Midwestern Writers on Food (U. Nebraska Press), is a literary midwestern food anthology. I asked 30 writers for a food-centric memoir or essay on feeding, cooking, or growing food. It is always much more than taste: it’s a source of pleasure, sustenance, or adventure.
I continue to volunteer with something very dear to my heart—resettling refugees into the Chicago area. My food writing skills led me to develop and launch Fig&Honey, a Syrian catering company; also, to write a guest article about one of the most courageous and resilient Syrian refugees for USA for UNHCR The UN Refugee Agency.
Education: B.F.A. in Cinema from CalArts
Professional Development Certificate, Creative Non-fiction, Northwestern
highlighted Work
Feature film Food Consultant
As food consultant on Italian director Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All, a feature film shot in the Midwest of the late 1980s, I recommended all the food and drink that appeared onscreen. Whether filmed in a refrigerated meat aisle in a grocery; in a trailer home when a fridge opened or food was cooking on the stove; at food stalls at a county fair; at a slumber party; or during lunch served in a diner.
Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet Yannis Drakoulidis/Metro Goldwyn Mayer
Contemporary anthology of
essays on midwestern food
“That very American impulse to claim ownership — and to define our separate experiences through food — is on full display in Peggy Wolff’s Fried Walleye And Cherry Pie…Heartland natives will embrace the recipes, if not the remembrances of State Fair corn dogs and Lake Michigan fish boils, German kuchen and tamales eaten on Chicago’s Maxwell Street, a.k.a. ‘the Ellis Island of the Midwest.’”