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The Karola Saekel Craib Excellence in Food Journalism Fellowship

Photo by Judy Doherty

The Karola Saekel Craib Excellence In Food Journalism Fellowship was created in 2010 in recognition of Karola’s more than fifty-year career in journalism and immeasurable contributions. Her reporting and writing excellence helped define food journalism at the time. Karola, who sadly passed away the spring of 2011, was greatly honored by our creating the fellowship and she helped us formulate the criteria.

This $5,000 fellowship is awarded annually to a woman and/or nonbinary food/wine journalist whose writings show talent and promise and is a non-Dame journalist in the greater San Francisco Bay Area . They will have no more than 10 years working full time in the field .The Karola Fellowship recipient will demonstrate a commitment to a career in food/wine journalism with excellence and range in writing.

Photo by: Kristen Loken Photography

"There are two projects I've spent years dreaming of bringing to life and I'm overjoyed to finally be able to make them realities. One is a collection of miniature food zines and the second is a personal archival project called Chopsticks for Gumbo, a collection of food memories from my Martiniquais-Japanese-American household. I'm so humbled and honored that The Karola Saekel Craib Excellence in Food Journalism Fellowship will allow me to transition these projects from idea to actuality. What a thrill!” -- Briana James 2024 Fellowship Recipent

"What an amazing honor to be recognized by such an immensely talented group of women journalists. Writing and reporting about food, agriculture and food systems is really fulfilling (and fun!) but also challenging. This is such a boost of encouragement to forge ahead!" -- Anne Marshall-Chambers 2022 Fellowship Recipient 

"I’m so grateful to be recognized by this community of women who appreciate the power of good food and good journalism and work to support them both. Especially in times like these, your encouragement to continue writing about food—something that brings us together and connects us so uniquely—means so much." --Tienlon Ho 2021 Fellowship Recipient

“It’s such a crazy honor to be recognized by such a talented group of women whose work I’ve so long admired.  Thank you -- for cooking and writing and producing ... and for reading. I’ll definitely be carrying your encouragement with me.” --Rachel Levin 2018 Fellowship Recipient

"Thank you so much for the amazing honor. I will take it as a vote of confidence at a time when writing is all too under-valued. And I feel immensely lucky to have my work taken seriously by such an important group of inspiring women." --Twilight Greenaway, 2012 Fellowship Recipient


Fellowship Criteria:

The fellowship is given annually to a promising Bay Area woman and/or nonbinary food /wine journalist who:

  • Exhibits a commitment to a career in food journalism* 
  • Demonstrates excellence and a range of writing (either a variety of topics or broad coverage on a single subject)*
  • Shows relevancy to today’s food/wine/social justice landscape in her/their writing
  • Has not more than ten years full-time in the field of food journalism*
  • Is not a Les Dames member

*How we define Food Journalism*

Print or online articles or broadcast journalism on food, wine & spirits, agriculture, policy, restaurant criticism, and foodways and food culture. Stand-alone cookbooks can be considered as a part of a candidate’s overall body of work. We may consider podcasts and blogs as part of a candidate’s range if the content is journalistic in nature and the writer is published elsewhere. (Recipe blogs are not considered at this time.)



2024 Recipient

Briana James


Bri is an illustrator (who writes) for kids and food people. She is known for her vibrant and joyful visual narratives which celebrate both ancestral wisdom and everyday life. She has been featured in The New York Times, Inc. Magazine, Edible East Bay, and Eater, among others. By day, she is an Assistant Editor at Clarkson Potter, supporting and acquiring for the Cookbook and Culture & Gift teams. Bri lives in Oakland, California with her partner, kiddo, cairn terrier, and trio of chickens. You can find her online at brijames.com and on instagram @artish.reader.


Past recipients:

2023 Teresa Cotsirilos is a staff reporter at the Food and Environment Reporting Network (FERN), where she covers labor rights and climate equity in the nation’s food system. An award-winning reporter and producer, her work has been published by the New York Times, Reveal, NPR, Mother Jones, Snap Judgment, the California Report Magazine, the World, and other outlets. Read more about Teresa and her writings at teresamariacotsirilos.com.

2022 Anne Marshall-Chalmers is an investigative reporter at The War Horse and a former freelance writer and senior reporter for Civil Eats. A California native, she spent several years working as a reporter, writer, and audio producer in Tennessee and Kentucky before returning to the Bay Area. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Gastro Obscura, USA Today, Bay Nature, Earth Island Journal, NPR, CalMatters, Inside Climate News, and Louisville Magazine.

2021 Tienlon Ho writes about food, history, and science, and often where these intersect. She’s the co-author of Mister Jiu’s in Chinatown (Ten Speed Press, 2021), a narrative cookbook about the groundbreaking restaurant and how San Francisco’s Chinatown changed the flavor of America. It was named an LDEI M.F.K. Fisher Work of Distinction 2022 and earned a 2022 James Beard Award. She’s written for publications including San Francisco Chronicle, Lucky Peach (RIP), California Sunday (RIP), Slate, GQ, and The New York Times. Her work is anthologized in Best Food Writing and earned the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Gold Award for culinary travel writing and the 11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism Fellowship. Read more about Tienlon and her writing at tienlon.com.

2021 Esther Mobley is the senior wine critic at the San Francisco Chronicle. Since joining the paper in 2015, she has reported on all the movements of California’s $40 billion wine industry, from wildfires to undocumented vineyard workers to climate change to the rise of natural wine. Since 2018, she has published a weekly email newsletter called Drinking with Esther. Previously, Esther was an assistant editor at Wine Spectator magazine in New York, and she has worked as a harvest intern at wineries in Napa Valley and Mendoza, Argentina. She was named Feature Writer of the Year in the 2019 Louis Roederer International Wine Writers’ Awards. The previous year, she won first place in the California News Publishers Association Awards Print Contest for feature writing for a story about a winery owned by a California cult, and first place for agricultural reporting, for her writing on Napa Valley's land-use controversies. Her work was recognized as the Best Writing on Beer, Wine or Spirits by the Association of Food Journalists in 2017 and 2019. Find her portfolio of work at esthermobley.com.

2020 Ruth Gebreyesus is a writer and producer based in the Bay Area. Her work centers cultural products and their movement across physical and digital margins. She's currently working on a documentary project about food consumption and production with chef and writer Tunde Wey. Previously, Ruth served as the food reporter and columnist at KQED. Outside of the food realm, she has presented on Black digital production at the Oakland Museum of California and at the New Museum in New York. She is also currently a co-curator of Black Life, a multidisciplinary film and art series at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive.

2019 Soleil Ho joined the San Francisco Chronicle’s as its Restaurant Critic in 2019 and joined the Opinion Section in 2023. As an opinion columnist and cultural critic, Soleil focuses on gender, race, food policy and life in San Francisco. In 2022, they won a Craig Claiborne Distinguished Restaurant Review Award from the James Beard Foundation. Previously, Ho worked as a freelance food and pop culture writer, as a podcast producer on the Racist Sandwich, and as a restaurant chef.

2018 Rachel Levin has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times, Outside, Eater, and Bon Appetit, and elsewhere. Her essay on grapefruit spoons was included in Best American Food Writing 2022. She is the author of Look Big: And Other Tips for Surviving Animal Encounters of All Kinds, and the coauthor of two cookbooks: Eat Something: A Wise Sons Cookbook for Jews Who Like Food and Food Lovers Who Like Jews and Steamed: A Catharsis Cookbook for Getting Dinner and Your Feelings on the Table. Rachel recently published her first kids book, with Phaidon. WHO ATE WHAT? A (gorgeously illustrated!) glimpse of gastronomical history, from the cave days to the space days and beyond.

2017 Bonnie Tsui  is a longtime contributor to The New York Times and the author of American Chinatown, winner of the 2010 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. She has written about Michelin street food, Hong Kong's rooftop farmers, shark fin soup, and the enduring role of Chinatowns for The New Yorker, California Sunday, Pop-Up Magazine, and Afar. Her book Why We Swim was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a TIME magazine and NPR Best Book of the Year; it is currently being translated into ten languages. Bonnie is a cultural consultant for the forthcoming Hulu series Interior Chinatown, based on Charles Yu's award-winning novel. Her new book, On Muscle: The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters, will be published in April 2025. Read more about Bonnie at bonnietsui.com.

2016 Lisa Morehouse is an award-winning public radio reporter, producer and editor, and is the Senior Editor for KALW's news magazine, Crosscurrents.  She is currently at work on California Foodways, a county-by-county exploration of stories at the intersection of food, culture, economics, history and labor. For that series, she won national Edward R. Murrow and SPJ NorCal awards, and was named an 11th Hour/UC Berkeley Food and Farming Journalism fellow and nominated five times for a James Beard Journalism Award.  She holds a Certificate in Documentary Arts from Duke University’s Center For Documentary Studies.

2015 Rachel Khong was an editor of Lucky Peach magazine from 2011 to 2016. In 2017, she published the novel Goodbye, Vitamin, which received the California Book Award from the Commonwealth Club. In 2018, she founded The Ruby, a work and event space for women and nonbinary artists and writers in San Francisco. Her second novel, Real Americans, published in April 2024 has been named a must read book of 2024.

2014 Jessica Battilana has relocated from San Francisco to Portland, Maine, where she is staff editor at King Arthur Baking Company.  She is currently at work on a second solo cookbook, to be published by Norton in 2023, which will join her first, Repertoire, published in 2018.

2013 Emily Kaiser Thelin is associate creative director at Apple and was previously content director at Blue Bottle Coffee and editorial director for recipes at the organic meal kit delivery company, Sun Basket. Her biographical cookbook about culinary legend and Alzheimer’s advocate Paula Wolfert, Unforgettable: The Bold Flavors of Paula Wolfert’s Renegade Life was published in April 2017, continues to receive accolades and critical acclaim.

2012 Twilight Greenaway is currently reporting on climate and equity through a grant from the UC Berkeley School of Journalism. She is the former managing and executive editor at Civil Eats, a daily news source for critical thought about the American food system. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Food & Wine, Mother Jones, and on Grist among other outlets. She also writes The Window, a climate-focused newsletter.

2011 Sarah Henry is the author of Hungry for Change (2018) and Farmsteads of the California Coast (2016). For Running Press, she teamed up with chef Preeti Mistry to co-write her memoir The Juhu Beach Club Cookbook: Indian Spice, Oakland Soul (2017). She has written about food matters for The Washington Post, Plate, Eater SF, San Francisco Chronicle, and Edible San Francisco. Her work has also appeared in the anthology Best Food Writing (2014 & 2015).

2010 Novella Carpenter is the author of two memoirs, Farm City and Gone Feral. She teaches Urban Agriculture at the University of San Francisco, in the environmental studies department, exploring the connections between race and gender in agriculture. She’s working on a new memoir called Straw in My Bra, about her adventures at her urban feedstore in Berkeley.


Donate to the Fellowship


Les Dames d' Escoffier Int'l-San Francisco
lesdamessf@gmail.com


Les Dames d’Escoffier International, San Francisco Chapter, is a 501 (c)(3) (EIN 20-5341764) Your contribution is tax deductible to the extent allowed by law.

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