For clips and info about my “Fish Tales” Conversation Projects, click “ALL PROJECTS” in the menu above the photo. For a schedule, click “UPCOMING APPEARANCES.”

Jennifer Burns Bright is an Oregon writer, teacher, and food consultant who splits her time between Portland and tiny Port Orford on the southern Oregon coast.  This migrancy allows her to specialize in sustainable seafood and foraging on coastal adventures and the agricultural avant-garde in the Willamette Valley. She specializes in investigating local terroir, cooking with regional specialties, and connecting those who harvest with those who consume. In 2017-18, Bright is moderating community discussions throughout Oregon on American seafood traditions and challenges through the NEH-funded Oregon Humanities Conversation Project.

Bright taught literature and food studies at the University of Oregon 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. As a community organizer linking local producers and consumers, Bright often speaks and teaches at events. When she’s not out gathering seaweed or smoking black cod, she might be found judging culinary masterpieces or interviewing luminaries in the food world. She’s most proud of her collaborative projects, including co-hosting the fabulous radio program Food for Thought on KLCC, Eugene’s NPR affiliate, 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 cheese shops in the West, Riesling confetti jelly, steelhead, skate ceviche, seed science, Dutch herring, Taiwanese fruit, and the history of restaurants — appears in Gastronomica, Oregon Quarterly, NPR’s The Salt, AAA’s Via, and Eugene Magazine, among others.