Todd Kliman
The Wild Vine
A Forgotten Grape and the Untold Story of American Wine
Clarkson Potter, 2010
Todd Kliman is Food and Wine Editor of The Washingtonian and also the magazine's restaurant critic. He was previously the food columnist for The Washington City Paper, where he won a prestigious James Beard Foundation Award for the country's best newspaper column in 2005.
His work has appeared in the anthologies Best Food Writing 2006 and Best Food Writing 2007, and in a range of publications, including The New Yorker, Harper's, Gourmet, National Geographic Traveler, and The Washington Post Magazine, among others. He writes a weekly column for NPR online, and can be heard regularly on "The Kojo Nnamdi" show on WAMU-FM.
His first book, The Wild Vine -- a work of narrative nonfiction that spans four centuries and two continents, features a multi-generational cast of mavericks and obsessives, and encompasses the stories of Cherokee nation, slavery, Thomas Jefferson, Prohibition, and American cultural hypocrisy -- is forthcoming from Crown, in 2009.
Kliman also taught English and literature for 10 years at American University and Howard University, twice being selected to Who's Who Among America's Teachers. At Howard, he was the editorial advisor to Chris Rock's controversial humor magazine, The Illtop Journal, modeled after the Harvard Lampoon.
