April Speaker

Langdon Cook

Mushroom harvesting is the largest all-cash business in North America (that's legal!). Award-winning author Langdon Cook embeds himself in the shadowy subculture, reporting from both rural woods and big city restaurants. Meet the pickers, buyers, and chefs in a patch-to-plate slideshow that reveals this frontier-style economy in action.

Langdon Cook is a writer, instructor, and lecturer on wild foods and the outdoors. His books include Upstream: Searching for Wild Salmon, from River to Table (Ballantine, May 2017), a finalist for the Washington State Book Award, The Mushroom Hunters: On the Trail of an Underground America, winner of the 2014 Pacific Northwest Book Award, and Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager, which The Seattle Times called “lyrical, practical and quixotic.” Cook’s work has been nominated for two James Beard Awards, a Society of Environmental Journalists award, and a Pushcart Prize. He has been profiled in Bon Appetit, WSJ magazine, Whole Living, and Salon.com, and his writing appears in numerous magazines, newspapers, and online journals, including National Geographic Traveler, Eating Well, Outside, Gray’s Sporting Journal, and Seattle Magazine, where he was a regular columnist for a decade. On-screen credits include the PBS TV series “Food Forward,” the Travel Channel’s “Trip Flip,” and the webcast “The Perennial Plate.” He has also been the recipient of grants and awards from Artist Trust, 4Culture, PEN Northwest, and the Bread Loaf Writing Conference. A graduate of Middlebury College in Vermont (BA) and the University of Washington (MFA), Cook lives in Seattle with his wife, poet Martha Silano, and their two children.