Conversations from the Cullman Center: Lunch Stories with Ian Frazier, Karen Russell, Danny Meyer, and Molly O'Neill

 

Molly O'Neill is the author of several cookbooks and of Mostly True: A Memoir of Family, Food, and Baseball. For many years, she was the food columnist for The New York Times Magazine and the host of the PBS series Great Foods. Her food columns have also appeared in The New Yorker and Food and Wine. She has been nominated twice for a Pulitzer Prize and is the recipient of the Julia Child/ACP Award for Cookbooks.

 

Danny Meyer's restaurants include the Union Square Café, Maialino, Gramercy Tavern, Blue Smoke, Shake Shack, and The Modern, several of which hold New York Times and Michelin stars. He is the founder and CEO of the Union Square Hospitality Group and the author, most recently, of Setting the Table: The Power of Hospitality in Restaurants, Business, and Life.

 

A staff writer for The New Yorker and one of the country's most treasured humorists, Ian Frazier is the author of several books, including On the Rez, Great Plains, Family, and Coyote vs. Acme. While a fellow at the Cullman Center in 2009-10, he finished his book Travels in Siberia. Most recently, he turned his popular New Yorker Cursing Mommy "Shouts and Murmurs" column into a novel, The Cursing Mommy Book of Days.

 

Karen Russell's short stories have appeared in several publications, including The New Yorker, Granta, Best American Short Stories, and Zoetrope. She was awarded the Bard Fiction Prize in 2011 for her collection of stories, Saint Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. Her novel, Swamplandia!, which she completed while a Fellow at the Cullman Center, was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and won the Library's Young Lions Award.

 

Books by the journalist and culinary historian Laura Shapiro include Julia Child, A Life, and Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Gourmet, and Slate. At the Cullman Center in 2009-10, she worked on a book of biographical essays on women and food, including Dorothy Wordsworth, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Eva Braun. She is the co-curator, with Rebecca Federman, of the exhibition "Lunch Hour NYC" currently on view at the 42nd Street New York Public Library.

 

Rebecca Federman is a librarian at The New York Public Library who has worked extensively on the Library's menu collection. She created the "What's on the Menu" website, a digital database of menus to which patrons contribute by transcribing the names and prices of dishes as they consult documents on line http://menus.nypl.org/. She is the co-curator of the exhibition Lunch Hour NYC, currently on view at the 42nd Street Library.