New Nach Waxman Award announced

Kitchen Arts & Letters bookstore in NYC and the Waxman family have announced a shortlist of nominations for the inaugural Nach Waxman Prize for Food and Beverage Scholarship. You may remember that Waxman, who founded Kitchen Arts & Letters in 1983, passed away suddenly in 2021.

The prize will recognize a “US-published book which invites the general public to seriously consider issues in culinary and beverage history, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, geography, and other fields of study,” according to the announcement sent out by the bookstore on April 3.

For books published in 2023, the nominees in alphabetical order by author are:

• Fuchsia Dunlop – Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food
• Diane Flynt – Wild, Tamed, Lost, Revived: The Surprising Story of Apples in the South
• Rebecca May Johnson – Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen
• Deborah L. Krohn – Staging the Table in Europe: 1500-1800
• Sarah Lohman – Endangered Eating: America’s Vanishing Foods

The winner of the award will be announced May 7, 2024, along with two honorable mentions. At that time Kitchen Arts & Letters will also announce an online discussion between the prize winner and the judges who selected the book. The judging panel is composed of:

• Darra Goldstein, who has won several James Beard and IACP awards for her cookbooks and food writing
• Morna Livingston, Professor Emerita of the College of Architecture & the Built Environment at Jefferson University
• Mayukh Sen, who is also a James Beard and IACP Award-winning author and journalist