At the intersection of food and story, The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food offers a collection of food-related stories are set in North Carolina, though geography is sometimes secondary to the main theme, which is food in any form: meals and manners, cooking and ingredients, recipes and recollections. Novelist Michael Parker writes about his mother's reluctant, but exclamation-point-laden food column for her husband's newspaper; Celia Rivenbark remembers her summer job at the only sit-down restaurant in her eastern Carolina hometown; chef and former vegetarian Cathy Cleary reveals what led her to sit down to a pork dinner. Bridgette Lacy celebrates mid-summer "Mater Days" in newsrooms of daily papers where she worked. Writer and goat farmer Tom Rankin writes about taking his goats to be slaughtered by a halal butcher from Afghanistan in Sanford. John McElwee takes us to the annual celebratory Blue Monday shad fry along the Cape Fear River. The collection is edited by Randall Kenan, an award-winning novelist and food writer. Some of North Carolina's favorite writers regale us with stories: Lee Smith, Daniel Wallace, Marianne Gingher, Jill McCorkle, Jaki Shelton Green, Wayne Caldwell, Marcie Cohen Ferris, Michael McFee, Zelda Lockhart, Crook's Corner's popular chef Bill Smith, noted cookbook author Nancie McDermott, and many others.

ABOUT THE EDITOR

The late Randall Kenan was an award-winning novelist, journalist, and food writer. He wrote about food for a variety of publications, most notably a profile of culinary food historian Michael Twitty for Garden & Gun. He also taught a course on food writing at UNC-Chapel Hill, where he was a professor of English.

His books include Visitation of the Spirits, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, If I Had Two Wings, and The Fire This Time. He received numerous awards and honors, including the North Carolina Award for Literature in 2005, and was elected to the Fellowship of Southern Writers in 2007. He was the recipient of the John Dos Passos Prize and the Rome Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.