Kelly Alexander is a writer and an anthropologist of food based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. For many years she was a senior editor at Saveur magazine, during which she became the youngest writer to win a James Beard Journalism Award for reporting. Prior to joining Saveur, Alexander worked as an editor at Food & Wine magazine. Her essays and articles on food have appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, Gourmet, The Oxford American, The New Republic, O: The Oprah Magazine, Newsweek, and many other publications. She has written and co-written a number of cookbooks, including the New York Times bestseller Smokin' with the barbecue pit master Myron Mixon, now in its twelfth printing, and the critically acclaimed culinary biography Hometown Appetites: The Story of Clementine Paddleford, the Forgotten Food Writer. Alexander has been a regular contributor on the subject of food for NPR programs across the country. She is a graduate of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, and PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at Duke University. Her dissertation fieldwork focuses on a network of activists, cooks, and volunteers working to recirculate food waste in Brussels, Belgium.