Elissa

Altman

Food Writer & Literary Memoirist

James Beard Award for Excellence

Travels from: Hartford, CT

“Rarely has a mother-daughter relationship been excavated with such honesty. The result is a testament to the power of love and family.” —Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance

Elissa Altman is an award-winning author of literary memoir, essay, and food narrative, who writes from the place where sustenance, the natural world, 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, 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, which is now a popular Substack.

Her first book, Poor Man’s Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking, was published in 2013 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 in 2016. Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing, was published in hardcover in 2019, and released as paperback in 2020, and was a 2020 Lambda Award finalist. The audio edition, produced and directed by Scott Sherratt, was released with the author narrating in 2019. Altman’s new book, On Permission — a meditation on creativity and story ownership based on Altman’s popular memoir workshops at Fine Arts Work Center and Maine Writers and Publishers — is coming from Godine in 2024. Her essays have appeared in publications including Orion, Lion’s Roar, and O: The Oprah Magazine to LitHub, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, where her column, Feeding My Mother, ran for a year. A member of The Environmental Storytelling Studio at Brown University, Altman lives in New England.

Elissa's Featured Titles

Elissa Altman | Talks and Visits

Elissa Altman speaks regularly both solo and in conversation with other authors, artists, and thinkers; her partners have included Anne Lamott, Michael Cunningham, Dani Shapiro, Sue Miller, Madhur Jaffrey, and others. Altman’s talks intersect subjects ranging from permission to write and create, and the moral obligation to care for our elders (even when they drive us crazy), to human spirituality, and finding sustenance everywhere from the environment to the table. Altman also speaks on issues connected to queerness and religion, addiction, resilience, and how art-making is kryptonite for silence and shame.

TESS: The Environmental Storytelling Studio

On marrying scholarship with literary storytelling

On Permission and Questions of Story Ownership: Is It Your Right to Write?

Fine Arts Work Center, 2022 – An exploration of the intersection of fear, creativity, and overcoming creative paralysis

On Jewish Feminism, Queerness, and the American Jewish Experience

College of William and Mary, 2021-2022 – A talk about the intersection of feminism, queerness, and the American Jewish experience, as seen through lenses of Treyf and Motherland

On Sustenance and Feeding the Soul

San Miguel de Allende Literary Festival: 2022 – A conversation on how sustenance comes in all forms, from family stories and myths to the table, and beyond.

On Motherland - Humor, Addiction, and Healing from Family Trauma

Creativity, mental illness, and writing complicated mothers

Writing Your Story, Feeding Your Soul: Cultivating Creativity and Finding Sustenance Through Storytelling

Healing the Epidemic of Isolation for Senior Citizens by Bringing Them to the Table

Permission to Write One's Story: The Art & Craft of Memoir

Healing the Epidemic of Isolation for Senior Citizens | Elissa Altman | TEDxUniversityofNevada

On Permission and Questions of Story Ownership: Is It Your Right to Write?

Anne Lamott and Elissa Altman in Conversation

“True to the trajectory of Altman’s literary career thus far, Motherland offers something completely new not only to her own oeuvre, but also to the world of queer literature writ large. . . . Altman’s gorgeous new memoir makes clear . . . that many of us ‘want to know,’ that we ‘want to understand,’ but that we have been born into families or circumstances in which secrets and appearances and silences are held close to chest. Motherland lyrically, quietly, but relentlessly seeks out these secrets, trying to know, trying to understand.” – Lambda Literary

“I’m reading Motherland right now and loving it!”—Cheryl Strayed, New York Times bestselling author of Wild, via Twitter

“Rarely has a mother-daughter relationship been excavated with such honesty. Elissa Altman is a beautiful, bighearted writer who mines her most central subject: her gorgeous, tempestuous, difficult mother and the terrain of their shared life. The result is a testament to the power of love and family.” – Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance

“Nobody writes about food and family like Elissa Altman…” – Debbie Millman, host of Design Matters

“Wise, evocative, and rich in insight, this compassionate and beautiful memoir is ultimately an act of love.” – Claire Messud, author of The Burning Girl, on Motherland

“An acclaimed food writer and memoirist’s account of the codependent relationship she had with her charming and outrageous — but very difficult — mother … Funny, raw, and tender, Altman’s book examines the inevitable role reversals that occur in parent-child relationships while laying bare a mother-daughter relationship that is both entertaining and excruciating. An eloquent, poignant memoir.” – Kirkus Reviews on Motherland

“Sometimes heartbreaking, often hilarious, [Poor Man’s Feast] is one of the finest food memoirs of recent years.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Treyf is a memoir that reads like a novel, a spellbinding portrait of a very specific world that also serves as a universal primer on identity, on loneliness, on the nature of familial bonds, on the ways we make sense of the mess of our lives. Gorgeous, singular, heartbreaking, haunting.”– Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year