What makes Southern baking special?  Join us as bestselling author, Anne Byrn, shares stories and recipes from Baking in the American South in conversation with Nancie McDermott.

Baking in the American South will become the definitive guide to the South’s rich baking legacy. The 200 recipes come from 14 states, from family recipes, department stores, cafeterias, tea rooms, boarding houses, churches, synagogues, and even the White House.  A fifth-generation Southerner who has been a food writer for four decades, Byrn, whose passion and knowledge of Southern baking runs deep, enlivens the recipes with untold stories about the people who created them and the ingredients and circumstances that define them. She says Southern baking is possibly the first and finest style of baking America has ever known.  

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Anne Byrn is a New York Times bestselling food writer and cookbook author based in Nashville, Tennessee, where she learned to cook and bake as a child. For fifteen years she was the food editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and she attended La Varenne École de Cuisine in Paris, receiving an advanced certificate. But while raising three children and cooking for a busy family she embraced some shortcuts and wrote the bestseller, The Cake Mix Doctor, one of Southern Living magazine’s top 100 cookbooks of all time. She is also the author of American Cake and Skillet Love. When she isn’t baking and gardening, Anne writes a weekly newsletter called Between the Layers on Substack. 

ABOUT THE MODERATOR:  Nancie McDermott is a North Carolina food writer and educator.  Nancie earned a James Beard Foundation award nomination for her Southern Living cover story in 2018, and has written on food and travel for Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, Fine Cooking, Cooks Illustrated, Every Day with Rachel Ray, Family Fun, Food Arts, and the Los Angeles Times. Her national television credits include playing the role of Cake Historian on Alton Brown’s Peabody Award-winning Food Network program, “Good Eats”; leading a Thai market tour in Los Angeles for Discovery Channel’s “Epicurious” and cooking Thai food in the Dream Kitchen on Better Homes and Gardens’ BHG-TV.

Greensboro Public Library thanks the Proximity Hotel for being the designated hotel for this program.