Elissa Altman
Fee: $10/person in advance; $12/person day of event (includes refreshments)

From James Beard Award-winning writer Elissa Altman, comes a story that marries wit and warmth, and flavor to passion. Born and raised in New York to a food-phobic mother and food-fanatical father, Elissa was trained early on that fancy is always best. But love does strange things to people, and when Elissa met Susan - a small-town Connecticut Yankee with parsimonious tendencies and a devotion to simple living - it would change Elissa's relationship with food, and the people who taught her about it, forever.

With tender and often hilarious honesty (and 27 delicious recipes), "poor Man's Feast" is a universal tale of finding sustenance and peace in a world of excess and inauthenticity, and shows us how all our stories are inextricably bound up with what, and how, we feed ourselves and those we love.

Elissa Altman is the winner of the 2012 James Beard Award for her food Blog. She is a food and cookbook writer and editor. Her works have appeared in The New York Times  and Huffington Post.