About John T.

John T. Edge hosts the television show TrueSouth on the SEC Network, ESPN, and Hulu. The Penguin Press published The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South, named a best book of 2017 by NPR, Publisher‘s Weekly, and a host of others. Now in paperback, Nashville selected the book as a citywide read. Edge is a contributing editor at Garden & Gun. For twenty-two years, he served as a columnist for the Oxford American. For three years he wrote the “United Tastes” column for the New York Times. He has won four James Beard Foundation Awards, including two M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Awards. Elected to the Georgia Writer’s Hall of Fame in 2019, he received an honorary doctorate from Centenary College of Louisiana that same year.

Edge lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his wife Blair Hobbs, an accomplished artist and teacher. At the University of Mississippi he serves the Department of Writing and Rhetoric as Writer-in-Residence and directs the Mississippi Lab, where his projects include the launch of Greenfield Farm Writers Residency, set on a parcel off land outside Oxford where William Faulkner once raised mules. From 1999 through 2021, Edge served the Southern Foodways Alliance as director. Now retired from that position, he occasionally helps SFA with fundraising and special projects. Since 2105, Edge has also taught in the low-residency MFA program in narrative nonfiction at the Grady College of Journalism at the University of Georgia.