About the Author

Crescent Dragonwagon (yes, that is her real name) explores cooking, eating, thinking, living, loving, and even dying and grieving, fearlessly. She does this through multiple genres: both short and long, for both children and adults, in fiction and non-fiction, in books, blogs, videos, and articles. She has been followed diverse paths of interest since she was sixteen, when her first two books were accepted for publication (RAINY DAY TOGETHER, a children's book with Harper and Row, and THE COMMUNE COOKBOOK, a cookbook/ culinary memoir with Simon & Schuster) . Her first two magazine articles, one a personal essay, the other a profile of a then-famous rock'n'roll groupie, were accepted that same year.Dragonwagon's much-loved cookbooks include the James Beard Award-winning PASSIONATE VEGETARIAN, the best-selling BEAN BY BEAN, CORNBREAD GOSPELS, DAIRY HOLLOW HOUSE SOUP & BREAD, and DAIRY HOLLOW HOUSE COOKBOOK. Dragonwagon has the distinction of having prepared beans and cornbread for a president (Bill Clinton) , titled royalty (Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia) , a world-renowned feminist (Betty Friedan) and Marilyn Monroe's first biographer (Maurice Zolotow) . And, for 18 years, with her late husband Ned Shank, she was innkeeper/chef/co-owner of Dairy Hollow House, an acclaimed country inn in the Ozark Mountain community of Eureka Springs, Arkansas. During this time, she cooked on Good Morning America, Today, TVFN, & CNN.Also well-known for her children's books, Dragonwagon's HALF A MOON AND ONE WHOLE STAR was a Coretta Scott King Award winner and a Reading Rainbow selection, while her ALWAYS, ALWAYS was a Parent's Choice Book of the Year. She's also the author of HOME PLACE, WILL IT BE OKAY, and ALL THE AWAKE ANIMALS, among many others. The daughter of children's book writer/editor Charlotte Zolotow, she serves as her mother's literary executor, and has overseen the reissuing and updating of many Charlotte's titles since 2012. Dragonwagon's fiction includes the novel THE YEAR IT RAINED, which was a New York Times Notable and has been published in five languages; it's now available on Kindle. TO TAKE A DARE, her first novel, co-authored with Paul Zindel, was recently reissued. Her first play, UNTIL JUST MOISTENED: A Not-Quite One-Woman Show, with Crumbs, was produced in 2018, and received an Artist 360 Grant for the project the following year. Dragonwagon considers herself a southern yankee: though born in New York, she lived in Arkansas for 38 years, with a 15-year stint back East between 2002 and 2017, when she moved back to New York, to spend time with her aging mother. She divided her time between there and Vermont, where she lived in the family summer home depicted in her children's book JEMIMA REMEMBERS. In 2018, however, she moved back to Arkansas.Renowned for her on-line and in-person writing workshops, classes, courses, and events, Dragonwagon is the originator and teacher o

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