Osayi Endolyn is a James Beard Award-winning writer, editorial consultant, producer, and cultural commentator. Her approach to storytelling explores the nexus of food culture, identity, music, and art.
Her work is featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Time, Eater, Food & Wine, Condé Nast Traveler, Travel + Leisure, the Wall Street Journal, and the Oxford American. Osayi’s commentary is featured on the Sporkful, Chef’s Table, The Next Thing You Eat, and Ugly Delicious. Her essays appear in the celebrated anthologies Black Food, Women on Food, and, You and I Eat the Same. Osayi is co-author of Black Power Kitchen, the imminent cookbook from Ghetto Gastro, and the bestseller The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food from Marcus Samuelsson. Her own narrative book on American restaurants and dining culture is forthcoming at Amistad/HarperCollins.
Osayi earned her BA in French from UCLA where she minored in Afro American studies, and her MFA in writing from the Savannah College of Art and Design. In 2019, she received the UC Berkeley-11th Hour Food & Farming Journalism Fellowship. That same year, Eater invited her to guest edit the inaugural Eater Young Gun section with stories focused on newcomers to the industry. In 2018, Southern Living named her one of 30 Women Moving Southern Food Forward. She is on the board of trustees for the Edna Lewis Foundation and Radical Xchange, and she advised PepsiCo’s inaugural Dig In initiative in support of Black-owned restaurants. A second-generation Californian and former resident of the South, she now lives in New York.
(photo credit: Andrew Thomas Lee)
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