THE EDITOR: May Bold Fork Book Club

ABOUT BOLD FORK BOOK CLUB
Our food writing section has it all - fiction, memoir, food studies, history and more. Led by a member of our team, Bold Fork Book Club is a monthly in-shop event where we pick a book to read ahead and discuss together in a group-- with snacks!

If you want to learn more about food and meet other members of the Bold Fork community, this is the group for you. Past Book Club books have included: Franchise by Marica Chatelain, Land of Milk and Honey by Pamela Zhang, and Consider the Fork by Bee Wilson among others.

NOTES:

THE AUTHOR WILL NOT BE IN ATTENDANCE.

IF YOU BUY A TICKET WITH A BOOK YOU WILL BE EMAILED WHEN YOUR BOOK IS READY FOR PICK UP OR SHIPMENT.

ABOUT THE BOOK
Legendary editor Judith Jones, the woman behind some of the most important authors of the 20th century—including Julia Child, Anne Frank, Edna Lewis, John Updike, and Sylvia Plath—finally gets her due in this “surprising, granular, luminous, and path-breaking biography” (Edward Hirsch, author of How to Read a Poem).

At Doubleday’s Paris office in 1949, twenty-five-year-old Judith Jones spent most of her time wading through manuscripts in the slush pile and passing on projects—until one day, a book caught her eye. She read it in one sitting, then begged her boss to consider publishing it. A year later, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl became a bestseller. It was the start of a culture-defining career in publishing.

During her more than fifty years as an editor at Alfred A. Knopf, Jones nurtured the careers of literary icons such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Tyler, and John Updike, and helped launched new genres and trends in literature. At the forefront of the cookbook revolution, she published the who’s who of food writing: Edna Lewis, M.F.K. Fisher, Claudia Roden, Madhur Jaffrey, James Beard, and, most famously, Julia Child. Through her tenacious work behind the scenes, Jones helped turn these authors into household names, changing cultural mores and expectations along the way.

Judith’s work spanned decades of America’s most dramatic cultural change—from the end of World War II through the civil rights movement and the fight for women’s equality—and the books she published acted as tools of quiet resistance. Now, based on exclusive interviews, never-before-seen personal papers, and years of research, her astonishing career is explored for the first time in this “thorough and humanizing portrait” (Kirkus Reviews).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sara B. Franklin is a writer, teacher, and oral historian. She received a 2020–2021 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Public Scholars grant for her research on Judith Jones, and teaches courses on food, writing, embodied culture, and oral history at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She is the author of The Editor, the editor of Edna Lewis, and coauthor of The Phoenicia Diner Cookbook. She holds a PhD in Food Studies from NYU and studied documentary storytelling at both the Duke Center for Documentary Studies and the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies. She lives with her children in Kingston, New York. Find out more at SaraBFranklin.com.

ABOUT GENEVIEVE (Discussion Leader)

Genevieve Villamora has been obsessed with food since she plucked a serrano chile from a steaming hot bowl of sinigang when she was four years old. In 2015, she opened Bad Saint, a tiny Filipino restaurant in Columbia Heights, which she co-owned and operated for 7 years. At a time when Filipino food was surprisingly unknown in American food culture, Bad Saint garnered national and international attention for its celebration of Filipino cuisine’s brash, pungent, and complex flavors. In 2016, Bad Saint was named the #2 Best New Restaurant in the U.S. by Bon Appetit and received a 3-star review from Pete Wells in The New York Times. Both Food & Wine and Esquire name Bad Saint one of the Most Influential Restaurants of the Decade in 2019. Genevieve currently serves as Chair of the Book Committee of the James Beard Foundation’s Media Awards. She has appeared on Bon Appetit’s Food People Podcast and NPR’s Code Switch Podcast. She has adapted recipes for The New York Times and the Smithsonian’s Annual Food History Weekend. A Chicago native, she has made her home in Washington, DC for the last 30 years. She lives in Columbia Heights with her husband, son, and three cats.