John T. Edge has served as director since the 1999 founding of the Southern Foodways Alliance, an institute of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. Winner of the M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award from the James Beard Foundation, he is author of The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South, which Penguin will publish in May of 2017. He holds an M.A. in Southern Studies from the University of Mississippi and an M.F.A. in Creative Non Fiction from Goucher College. A columnist for the Oxford American and Garden & Gun, Edge wrote the “United Tastes” column for the New York Times for three years.