Who we are
Rachel Louise Martin, PhD is the author of Hot, Hot Chicken: A Nashville Story, and she believes food gives us a unique connection into both the past and the future. "How Hot Chicken Really Happened," an essay for the Bitter Southerner, was included in Cornbread Nation: The Best of Southern Food Writing. She has been a featured guest on WBUR’s On Point, C-SPAN's Q&A, the BBC's Food Chain and KCRW's Good Food.
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She has spent about a decade in Nashville’s hospitality industry. There, she helped open three restaurants around town, all of which merited national recognition. She became head trainer at two of those establishments where she prepared servers and captains to tell the story behind the food prepared by James Beard award winning chefs. She also spent a year leading food history tours of downtown Nashville and writing a marketing blog for a hospitality company. She also works as a historical consultant with the Winthrop Group.
Speaking of writing, in addition to all of this, she is the author of the award-winning A Most Tolerant Little Town, and her essays have appeared in the Atlantic, CityLab, Oxford American and elsewhere. Her forthcoming book is a biography of First Lady Rosalynn Carter. She has a PhD in history from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she worked with the Southern Oral History Program.