About Don Lesser

My food writing career (as opposed to unpaid writing) began in 2003 with an article in the Daily Hampshire Gazette in Northampton. Worked my way up to three columns a month, since reduced to 2 due to financial issues at the Gazette.

I currently publish in the Gazette and Edible Pioneer Valley. I republish here since the Gazette site is subscription-only and many of you do not live where a subscription to the Gazette is desirable. For those who do live in the Pioneer Valley, I encourage the subscription: I want to keep publishing and the Gazette is a pretty good newspaper. It was New England Newspaper of the Year in 2008 and 2009.

In 2008, I won the James Peterson Food Writing Passion Scholarship and was a finalist for the Greenbriar Scholarship and the Apicius scholarship at the Greenbriar Symposium for Professional Food Writers. This was especially satisfying because it was awarded by fellow writers. I recommend the Symposium to anyone who is serious about food writing.

I’ve been writing and cooking for 40 years now. Grew up in NYC, moved to Buffalo, then Cambridge, and then Amherst and the Pioneer Valley in western Mass. Lived here for nearly 30 years. It is a beautiful part of the world, but jobs are hard to find so I started my own companies. I had come to Amherst to get an M.F.A. in Fiction (which I did in 1981) and got interested in computers, pre-PC & Mac. Became a technical writer, then trainer, and now owner of a small technical company, Pioneer Training.

Following the dictum, Shop locally, cook globally, I’ve been exploring the Pioneer Valley for regional treats, whether home grown, home made or simply imported. I’ve been lucky to have a local paper that lets me write what I want.

Why russelnod? It’s Don Lesser backwards, more or less. And the other anagram of my name, Nerd Loses, has got to go somewhere, but not here. If I’d been thinking ahead, I’d've probably gone with something more food-oriented, but then, if I’d've been thinking ahead, I would have done a lot of things differently.

Feel free to write me at donl at russelnod dot com (you know how to fix this).