Hi, I'm Jess.

I’m a writer, researcher, and audio producer. I report stories about history, food, culture, politics, and science. I also produce narrative audio, and research and fact-check for podcasts, documentaries, books, and other editorial projects.

I write about strange things seriously: mangoes revered during the Cultural Revolution, an archaeologist with 4,500 beer cans, Irish publicans who also bury the dead, a pastry chef who carved a kitchen out of snow at Denali base camp.

I work from period newspapers, government records, family papers, and from long conversations with people who are hard to find, or hard to ask. I’ve tracked down a living relative of Maria Orosa, the Filipina chemist who invented banana ketchup, smuggled rations into an internment camp inside hollow bamboo, and was killed in the Battle of Manila; the pastor who ate lunch at Georgia Gilmore’s table, while her underground kitchen kept the Montgomery bus boycott’s carpool running for 381 days; a co-founder of Bread and Roses, the feminist restaurant that ran in Cambridge from 1974 to 1978. Somewhere in the middle of all of this I had my fortune told in cheese. It was surprisingly accurate.

When the New York Times ran Maria Orosa’s belated obituary in its Overlooked series, it drew on my Lady Science feature and described it as the most authoritative account of her life. The National Park Service cites it too.

My reporting has appeared in Smithsonian Magazine, Atlas Obscura, Narratively, Serviette, Digest, Lady Science, and Hyphen Magazine, and in three books: A Southern Panther: Conversations with Malik Rahim, Appetite for Freedom, and Gastro Obscura: A Food Adventurer’s Guide. For Heritage Radio Network’s Meat and Three I reported and produced stories on disappearing food traditions, Indigenous foodways, and the case for Margaritaville. I lead-produced two episodes and co-hosted the one on pralines and the Angola 3, reported over three years, which won Signal Awards in History and Diversity, Equity & Inclusion and a Gold Davey.

Alongside the journalism I take on research and fact-checking. I’ve done development research for History Channel’s The Food That Built America and sourced material from the National Archives for Letterjoy, which reproduces historical letters alongside the story behind them. I currently research, fact-check, and write for Lost Women of Science, where I also manage a national Wikipedia initiative funded by Craig Newmark Philanthropies and co-organize edit-a-thons with the Smithsonian.

I came to journalism from research rather than the other way around. I spent five years conducting surveys, focus groups and interviews, and coding behavioral data at MDRC, the Columbia University Couples Lab, and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, where I interviewed trauma survivors for PTSD research.

I’m also Outreach Director for BC Voices, which produces a documentary series on the legal history and intimate impact of American women’s rights. I studied history at Barnard College.

If you have a story, project, or research problem, I’d love to hear about it.