Taos, NM – December 18, 2011
How
to Cook a Crocodile: A Memoir with Recipes, by Taos author and UNM-Taos
instructor Bonnie Lee Black, has just received three prestigious awards from Gourmand
International. Her book’s awards were in the categories of Food Literature,
African Cuisine (Gabon), and Charity and Community (North America).
The 16-year-old
organization Gourmand International, headquartered in Madrid, Spain, publishes
GOURMAND magazine and sponsors the Gourmand World Cookbooks Awards, held in a
different world capital each year. The 2011 awards will be presented on March 6,
2012, at the Folies Bergère in Paris, kicking off the weeklong Paris Cookbook
Fair. Black plans to attend the awards ceremony and book fair in Paris.
Among the
organization’s stated objectives are “to reward and honor those who cook with
words,” and “to increase knowledge of, and respect for, food and wine culture,
which promotes peace.” One of the jurors of the awards is Sara Baer-Sinnott, president
of the Boston-based foundation Oldways Preservation & Exchange Trust.
Black, a former
writer and editor in New York City, who also had her own catering business
there for ten years, decided to leave New York and join the Peace Corps at the
age of 50 in the mid-’90s. How to Cook a Crocodile is her account
of that time – from caterer to Manhattan’s elite to health-and-nutrition
volunteer in the rainforest of Gabon – written, as author Cherie Burns has
noted, with “perspective, warmth, and wit.”
“We enter her
world,” says Burns of Black’s Crocodile,
“with the initial thrill of discovery and then fall in love, as she did, with
the world she describes. What truly seduces us is experiencing it through
Black’s fine prose and her expert storytelling.”
Like M.F.K.
Fisher’s classic WWII-era book How to
Cook a Wolf, Black’s How to Cook a
Crocodile comprises a lively, literary, present-day survival guide.
Bonnie Lee Black
is the author also of Somewhere Child
(Viking Press) as well as the sequel to Crocodile,
Patchwork: A Memoir of Mali, not yet published. Last September, Black’s Patchwork manuscript won first place
in the Memoir Book category in the SouthWest Writers annual awards in
Albuquerque.
Black is an honors
graduate of Columbia University in New York. She holds a blue-ribbon diploma
from the New York Cooking School (now ICE) and also studied cooking at La
Varenne École de Cuisine, then in Paris. In 2007 she earned an MFA in Creative
Writing from Antioch University in Los Angeles. She now teaches in both the
English and Culinary Arts departments at UNM-Taos. For more information, go to www.bonnieleeblack.com.
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