Todd Richards
Advisory Board Chair
Chef Todd Richards is the co-owner of The Soulful Company Restaurant Group, overseeing Lake & Oak Neighborhood BBQ in the East Lake neighborhood of Atlanta and Soul: Food & Culture inside of Atlanta’s famed Krog Street Market. Todd previously helmed the kitchens of prestigious hotels and restaurants including The Shed at Glenwood, The Pig & The Pearl, Rolling Bones Barbecue, White Oak Kitchen & Cocktails, The Four Seasons Hotel Atlanta, The Ritz-Carlton (Atlanta, Buckhead, and West Palm Beach), Villa Christina and the Oakroom at the Seelbach Hotel. Richards’ debut cookbook, Soul: A Chef’s Culinary Evolution in 150 Recipes, shares his personal culinary exploration of soul food.
Cheetie Kumar
Advisory Board Vice Chair
Cheetie Kumar is an Indian American James Beard nominated self-taught chef. Born in Pennsylvania, she spent her early years in India before her family moved to the Bronx. In both places, she spent time in the kitchen with her mother and grandmother learning to cook. Cheetie and her husband, Paul Siler, co-owned Raleigh, North Carolina’s Garland restaurant, where she cooked Indian-Asian food with Southern influences. They closed Garland in August 2022, and have since opened Ajja, a restaurant specializing in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cuisine. When not in a kitchen, Cheetie is a talented musician who may be found playing guitar with the band Birds of Avalon.
Andrea Nguyen
Advisory Board Immediate Past Chair
A bank examiner gone astray, Andrea Nguyen is living out her dream of making impactful books, reporting compelling food stories, and teaching others how to cook well. She has worked on numerous food publications, including authoring The Pho Cookbook, a 2018 James Beard Award winner, and editing Unforgettable, the biography cookbook about Paula Wolfert. Her mother is extra proud that Andrea was a Jeopardy! clue.
Sarah Abell
Sarah Abell is a longtime SFA member and supporter. She is Executive Vice President and Partner at Baltz & Company, an agency that provides creative services and media relations for clients. Sarah works in the Denver office. She is an avid supporter of The Alzheimer’s Drug Discover Foundation, and has raised money for them with a team that runs the New York City Marathon.
Steven Alvarez
Former SFA Smith Fellow Dr. Steven Alvarez is Associate Professor of English at St. John’s University. He specializes in literacy studies and bilingual education with a focus on Mexican immigrant communities. Steven teaches courses ranging from Latinx literature, creative writing, ethnographic methods, and “taco literacy,” a course exploring the foodways of Mexican immigrants in the United States. He is the author of Brokering Tareas: Mexican Immigrant Families Translanguaging Homework Literacies (State University of New York Press) and Community Literacies en Confianza: Learning from Bilingual After-School Programs (National Council of Teachers of English). Steven is also the author of three books of poetry.
Sheri Castle
Sheri Castle joined the SFA in 2001. She’s an award-winning professional food writer, recipe developer, cooking teacher, and public speaker known for melding stories, humor, and culinary expertise. She is also the host of The Key Ingredient, an Emmy-winning cooking show from PBS that airs and streams across the country.
Erika Council
Erika Council is a food writer, recipe developer, and photographer behind the website Southern Soufflé. She has become a fixture in the southern culinary world with her popular Biscuit Company Bomb Biscuit Co. in Atlanta, Georgia. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Saveur, Food & Wine, and Essence magazine, among other publications. Outside of the kitchen, Erika offers her voice on the topics of African American food, social justice, and food’s impact on community. She is a native of North Carolina and attributes her passion for food and community to her grandmothers. One of these grandmothers, Mildred (Mama Dip) Council, was owner of the famous Mama Dip’s Kitchen in Chapel Hill.
Simone Delerme
Dr. Simone Delerme joined the University of Mississippi as McMullan Associate Professor of Southern Studies and Anthropology in the fall of 2013. She specializes in migration to the U.S. South, with interests in race relations, integration and incorporation, community development, and social class inequalities. The research for her first book, Latino Orlando: Suburban Transformation and Racial Conflict, focuses on Puerto Rican migration to Orlando, Florida, and the social class distinctions and racialization processes that create divergent experiences in Southern communities. Simone’s work has been featured in several academic publications, including Southern Spaces, Southern Cultures, and Anthropology News.
KJ Kearney
KJ Kearney is a native of North Charleston, SC. He’s a community organizer for the Charleston Promise Neighborhood non-profit organization and founder of Black Food Fridays. This James Beard Award-nominated social media advocacy initiative encourages everyone to purchase food and drinks from Black-owned restaurants every Friday. He’s also host of the PBS Digital Studios show, Citizen Better, produced by South Carolina ETV. He once wrote a proclamation for Red Rice adopted by the City of Charleston in 2018.
Hunter Lewis
Hunter Lewis is the Editor-in-Chief of Food & Wine magazine. A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he began his career as a reporter at The Herald-Sun in Durham, North Carolina. He moved on to cook under Jonathan Waxman in Sonoma County, California, and at Barbuto in New York City, before returning to writing and serving as the editor-in-chief of Cooking Light, executive editor of Southern Living, food editor of Bon Appétit, and kitchen director of Saveur.
Katie McKee
Dr. Kathryn McKee is the director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and McMullan Professor of Southern Studies and Professor of English at the University of Mississippi. She earned her B.A. from Centre College, and an MA and PhD from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. She is the author of Reading Reconstruction: Sherwood Bonner and the Literature of the Post-Civil War South (2019) and co-editor with Deborah Barker of American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary (2011). She teaches American literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, specializing in postbellum writing of the U.S. South.
