Welcome Hannah Howard!

Bloodroot is committed to a rotating editorial team. This year we welcome Hannah Howard, author of the forthcoming memoir Feast: True Love in and out of the Kitchen. Hannah Howard is a writer and food expert who spent her formative years in New York eating, drinking, serving, bartending, cooking on a hot line, and flipping giant wheels of cheese in Manhattan landmarks such as Picholine and Fairway Market. Her work has been published in New York magazine, VICE, and Self. She also mentors women recovering from eating disorders by helping them build happy, healthy relationships with food and themselves. 

Here's a short Q&A with Hannah:

Tell us about your book!

It’s my first book, a memoir called Feast: True Love in and out of the Kitchen. Feast is my story of working my way through restaurants and grocery stores in NYC, LA, and Philadelphia, falling in love with food (and the wrong men!), and recovering from an eating disorder. It’s a coming of age story, really. It’s about making peace with food, my body, my heart, and my world. It comes out on April 1, and I couldn’t be more thrilled, or more terrified. 

Do you write on paper or use your computer to generate a first draft?

I love the romance of writing on paper! But I’m terrible at it. I think too fast for my hand to keep up with my brain, and my fingers keep cramping up. So I’m a computer writer all the way, although I’ve knocked out more than a few pages with my thumbs on my phone during a long subway ride. Phone writing is not ideal. 

What inspires you?

The people and dreams and stories that come together in NYC, where I’m lucky enough to call home. And travel! I’m in Kerala right now, on the southwestern coast of India. The air is drippingly humid, the women wear such vibrant rainbows of colors, the smells of the sea and coconuts and trash overwhelm…I’m flooded with inspiration. I’m inspired by people I love, people I don’t understand, and people I meet for a moment or a day but think about for so much longer. Food has always been a juicy source of inspiration for me: the way it brings people together and carries with it both tradition and the possibility of something brand new. The way it can satisfy body and soul. 

Who are you reading right now?

I just finished Ariel Levy’s memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply, and I sobbed my way through. What a beautiful book! I’ve been devouring Alice Munro stories recently, and returning to some favorites: Zadie Smith, Ann Patchett, Mary Karr, and James Baldwin, who belongs in his own sphere of brilliance.