Bio: John Birdsall grew up near San Francisco and learned to cook at Greens Restaurant in that city. He spent the next seventeen years in professional kitchens there and in Chicago, and did some writing as a side gig, including food stories and restaurant reviews for the San Francisco Sentinel, a pioneering LGBTQ weekly. After leaving the kitchen, he was a restaurant critic and features writer at the Contra Costa Times and East Bay Express, and the editor of SF Weekly’s food blog. In 2014, John won a James Beard Award for food and culture writing for “America, Your Food Is So Gay” in Lucky Peach, and another in 2016 for “Straight-Up Passing” in the queer food journal Jarry. He’s co-author of the book Hawker Fare (with James Syhabout), published under the Anthony Bourdain imprint for Ecco–HarperCollins in 2018. The New Yorker’s Helen Rosner called John’s first solo book, The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard(Norton, 2020), “elegant and unvarnished,…beautifully unconventional.” The book was a finalist for a 2021 Lambda Literary Award, a finalist for the Publishing Triangle’s Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, and an Amazon Top 100 Best Book of the Year. John has written for Food & Wine, Bon Appétit, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Los Angeles Times, and taught culinary writing at the San Francisco Cooking School, and is a judge for the 2022 Publishing Triangle Randy Shilts and Judy Grahn Awards for gay and lesbian nonfiction. He’s married to Perry Lucina, an artist and designer, and lives in Tucson. Website: https://www.john-birdsall.com/ The Man who ate too much. https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Ate-Too-Much/dp/0393635716 This episode is sponsored by Culinary Historians of Northern California, a Bay Area educational group dedicated to the study of food, drink, and culture in human history. To learn more about this organization and their work, please visit their website at www.chnorcal.org If you follow my podcast and enjoy it, I’m on @buymeacoffee. If you like my work, you can buy me a coffee and share your thoughts 🎉☕ https://www.buymeacoffee.com/wellseasonedlib “Help us promote this podcast and share this episode with a friend” “Share on social and tag us at @WellLibrarian” “Follow The Well Seasoned Librarian Podcast on Spotify and get notified when

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