Elissa Altman is an award-winning author of literary memoir, essay, and food narrative, who writes from the place where sustenance, the power of the human spirit, and the promise of renewal converge.
Born and raised in New York City in the 1970s, Elissa Altman grew up a voracious reader and writer, a guitarist from the age of four trained under Eddie Simon, graduated from Boston University (CGS ‘83, CAS ‘85) and attended Cambridge University and the Institute for Culinary Education. A longtime, award-winning executive editor for major publishing houses including Clarkson Potter, Rodale Books, and HarperCollins, she acquired and edited sixteen New York Times bestsellers before devoting herself to writing full-time, and launching her James Beard Award-winning narrative food blog, Poor Man’s Feast, in 2008. Her first book, Poor Man’s Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking, was published in 2013 by Chronicle Books and declared by the New York Times Book Review “the finest food memoir of recent years.” Its critically-acclaimed prequel, Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw, was published by Berkley Books in 2016. Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing, was published in hardcover by Ballantine Books in 2019, will be released in paperback in 2020, and was a 2020 Lambda Award finalist. The Penguin Random House Audio edition, produced and directed by Scott Sherratt, was released with the author narrating, in 2019.
““No one writes about food and familial relationships in the incredible — and incredibly insightful — way that Elissa Altman does. ”
Altman’s work appears in publications including O: The Oprah Magazine, Narrative,Tin House, the Wall Street Journal, Krista Tippett’s On Being, The Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post (where her column, Feeding My Mother, ran for a year), Lion’s Roar (where her column on food, sustenance, and meditation is running weekly), and has been widely anthologized. She has been the recipient of a Vermont Studio Center residency, twice attended the Tin House Writer’s Workshop, and was a finalist for the Frank McCourt Memoir Prize, awarded by The Southampton Review.
A regular speaker to audiences large and small on issues surrounding family history, storytelling, sustenance, permission to create, faith, and the role of art-making in healing from trauma both societal and personal, Altman has spoken on stage at The Public in New York, the New School, gave a TEDx talk in 2017 on the moral obligation to bring senior citizens to our national conversation about food and nurturing. She teaches the craft of memoir at Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, 24 Pearl, 1440 Multiversity, the Loft Literary Center, Literature and Larder in Ireland, and Maine Publisher’s and Author’s Alliance.
An avid gardener, cook, and musician, Elissa lives with her wife, book designer Susan Turner, and their small herd of animals, in southwestern Connecticut.