Jennifer burns bright

Recent travel and food writing clips can be found here.

Preservation recipes on my former food blog can be found here.

Jennifer Burns Bright is a food educator, recipe developer and product consultant, and travel writer based in Astoria, Oregon.  She specializes in Pacific Northwest travel and sustainable seafood, developing commercial and home recipes and teaching culinary classes for the home cook, sharing her knowledge at venues on land and at sea, including museums, libraries, and cruise ships. She also produces and hosts an occasional radio program on Astoria’s KMUN, Coast Community Radio, called “A Fine Kettle of Fish,” which focuses on local seafood.

Since 2016, Bright has led over 70 Oregon Humanities Conversation Project community discussions (on seafood and the DIY movement) throughout Oregon. She contributes regularly to AAA’s print magazines in the West, which collectively reach almost five million households each issue, and many other media outlets.

Bright taught literature and food studies at the University of Oregon in Eugene for seven years, led a faculty research group in the emerging discipline of food studies, and won a national pedagogy award for a team-taught, interdisciplinary class on bread. She holds a PhD from the University of California at Irvine and a Master Food Preserver certification. She’s most proud of her collaborative projects, including co-hosting the local food radio program Food for Thought on Eugene’s NPR affiliate, co-organizing and managing FOH at a community dinner event showcasing local squash, and co-curating “Recipe: The Kitchen and Laboratory in the West, 1400-2000,” an exhibition of rare books and ephemera in the UO Special Collections at Knight Library.

Her writing — on subjects as varied as Olympia oysters, the secret to perfectly cooked albacore, chowders in the West, steelhead recipes, canning tuna, seed science, Dutch herring, Taiwanese fruit, and the history of restaurants — appears in Oregon Coast magazine, 1859 and 1889 lifestyle magazines in Oregon and Washington, Gastronomica, SeriousEats.com, Eater.com, Oregon Quarterly, NPR’s The Salt, AAA’s Via and Journey magazines, Acres USA, and Eugene Magazine, among many others.