Nyanyika Banda is a Malawian-American chef, writer, and entrepreneur. She earned a Culinary Degree from Madison College in 2012. While attending Madison College she competed and placed in multiple American Culinary Federation competitions. She has worked in a number of acclaimed kitchens across the country including WD-50 and the Saveur Magazine test kitchen. After her experiences in New York City, Banda moved back to the Midwest to attend the University of Wisconsin-Superior. She designed her history and writing majors around African Foodways and has been a scholar of the topic ever since. It was as an undergraduate that she started her writing career with a monthly column in the TASTE section of the Duluth News Tribune. She also started an underground pop-up restaurant called Martha’s Daughter. Her food garnered a cult following and on her graduation day she picked up the keys to her new brick and mortar. Banda helped put Duluth on the map with her critically acclaimed restaurant Martha’s Daughter, described by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune as “a stylish reflection of its chef/owner” with “an eclectic and globe-hopping menu of meticulously prepared and wonderfully affordable dishes.” In 2018 she won an Eater Award. Banda has since returned to her hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts where she teaches Culinary Arts at Holyoke Community College and continues to freelance. Banda has contributed to Food52, Thrillist, Saveur, and RESY; she also contributed an essay to the book Knives and Ink. Jesse J. Holland is an award-winning author, journalist, and television personality. He is the author and editor of the new Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda prose anthology from Titan Books and Marvel, the first prose anthology dedicated to the first mainstream black superhero. He is also the author of The Black Panther: Who Is The Black Panther? prose novel, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award in 2019 and The Invisibles: The Untold Story of African American Slavery Inside The White House, which was named as the 2017 silver medal award winner in U.S. History in the Independent Publisher Book Awards and one of the top history books of 2016 by Smithsonian.com. Jesse also wrote Star Wars: The Force Awakens - Finn’s Story young adult novel and Black Men Built The Capitol: Discovering African American History In and Around Washington, D.C. He was one of the first Black writers to author a solo Superman story with his story “Deadline” in the Superman: Red and Blue comic series and also wrote a semi-autobiographical story called “Heritage” for the Represent! comic series, both for DC Comics. Jesse was a longtime journalist for The Associated Press, serving as a White House, Supreme Court and Congressional reporter as well as a Race & Ethnicity writer in Washington. During his two decades in the nation’s capital, he was one of the few reporters to be a credentialed member of the White House press corps, the Supreme Court press corps and the Congressional press corps. Jesse currently hosts the Saturday edition of C-SPAN’s Washington Journal and serves as a commentator for NPR’s Here & Now and Black News Channel’s DC Today. He also is currently serving as an assistant professor at the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, where he teaches beginning journalists.
