Jessica B. Harris is the author of seven critically acclaimed cookbooks documenting the foods and foodways of the African Diaspora:

• Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons: Africa's Gifts to New World Cooking
• Sky Juice and Flying Fish Traditional Caribbean Cooking
• The Africa Cookbook: Tastes of a Continent.
• Her eighth, Beyond Gumbo: Creole Fusion Food from the Atlantic Rim, will be published by Simon & Schuster in March 2003.

A culinary historian, she has written articles in a wide variety of national and international publications and lectured on African-American foodways at numerous institutions and colleges throughout the United States and abroad.

She has also made numerous television appearances, including a stint as the resident food historian on Sara Moulton's Cooking Live Primetime on the Television Food Network.

She is currently working on On The Side: A Collection of Side Dishes and Condiments (Simon & Schuster), and a scholarly investigation entitled Nyam: a History of African American Foodways.