Michael W. Twitty

Michael W. Twitty is an African-American Jewish writer, culinary historian, and educator. He is the author of The Cooking Gene, published by HarperCollins/Amistad, which won the 2018 James Beard Foundation Book Award for Book of the Year as well as the category for writing. The book was also a finalist for The Kirkus Prize in nonfiction, the Art of Eating Prize and a Barnes and Noble New Discoveries finalist in nonfiction.

Twitty is openly gay. He was raised nominally Christian and converted to Judaism at age 25. He got engaged to Taylor Keith on July 17, 2018.

In 2013, Twitty gained greater media attention when he published an open letter to Paula Deen after she was fired from the Food Network. That same year he spoke at the MAD symposium in Copenhagen after being invited by Rene Redzepi, owner of NOMA. In 2016, he traveled to Vancouver to give a TED talk entitled "Gastronomy and the social justice reality of food". In 2016, Twitty received the inaugural Culinary Pioneer Award from Tastetalks and won both readers choice and editors choice for his letter to chef Sean Brock on Afroculinaria from Saveur. In January 2017, Colonial Williamsburg named Twitty its first Revolutionary in Residence.

In 2010, he launched Afroculinaria, a culinary history blog that covers African and African-American foodways. In 2010, Twitty worked with the D. Landreth Seed Company to compile the African American Heritage Collection of heirloom seeds for the company's 225th anniversary. The collection features roughly 30 plants, including the long-handled dipper gourd and the fish pepper, showcasing how instrumental they were to African-American survival and independence. In 2011, he began his "Cooking Gene" project, which would form the basis for his 2017 book The Cooking Gene. He is writing another book slated to come out in 2020, titled Kosher Soul.

Twitty was born in Washington, D.C. in 1977. According to historic records and data from DNA testing, his ancestors were originally Mende people from Sierra Leone, Akan people from Ghana and British and Irish immigrants whose descendants owned slaves. He first became interested in traditional cooking as a child when he went on a trip to Colonial Williamsburg. He majored in African-American studies and anthropology at Howard University, but did not finish due to financial constraints.