The Nach Waxman Prize Shortlist for Books Published in 2025
We're delighted to reveal the shortlist for the third annual Nach Waxman Prize for Food and Beverage Scholarship. This is one of the few prizes for food writing which carries a cash award: $5,500.
For books published in 2025, the nominees are:
The winner will be announced May 5, 2026, followed, on a date to be determined, by an online discussion between the prize winner and our panel of judges: Darra Goldstein, Morna Livingston, and Mayukh Sen.
The prize honors Nach Waxman (1936–2021), Kitchen Arts & Letters’ founder and a dedicated champion of food and beverage scholarship. Trained as an anthropologist at Cornell, the University of Chicago, and Harvard, Waxman spent more than twenty years as a book editor at Macmillan, Harper & Row and Crown before opening Kitchen Arts & Letters in 1983. Under his leadership, the store became “a go-to source for all kinds of culinary history and customs,” in the words of The New York Times.
His wife, Maron L. Waxman, says “Nach always wanted to understand the how and why things came to be the way they are. Wherever we traveled, he was interested in the terrain, the architecture, the food, and how people lived. A typical stop would be breakfast at what he called the old geezer coffee shop, where he could get a sense of the town from the folks lingering over their coffee and the day’s events.” We offer this prize in honor of his curiosity and spirit.
A panel of three judges made the selections from a group of nearly fifty entries. The judges were:
Darra Goldstein, the founding editor of Gastronomica and editor in chief of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Food Studies and winner of numerous prizes for her work in food, including James Beard and IACP awards.
Morna Livingston, Professor Emerita of the College of Architecture & the Built Environment at Jefferson University, who specializes in the study of gravity water systems and cultural landscapes.
Mayukh Sen is a James Beard and IACP Award-winning author and journalist whose book Taste Makers (2021) chronicled the lives of seven immigrant women who changed American cooking. He is also the author of the recently published Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star.
