About

For more than two decades, freelance writer and photographer Lisa M. Hamilton has documented agriculture and rural communities around the world. Her focus is on individual people’s struggles for power and resilience within a global food system.

She is the author of “The Hungry Season: A Journey of War, Love, and Survival” and “Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness.” Her feature articles have been published in Harper’s, McSweeney’s, California Sunday and The Best American Science and Nature Writing. She has also performed her work, at events ranging from the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, to Pop-Up Magazine at San Francisco’s Symphony Hall.

In 2019, Hamilton was a National Fellow with New America, and in 2013, the inaugural visiting scholar with the California Historical Society’s program “Curating California.” She has received additional fellowships and grants from the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, Alicia Patterson Foundation, and the Creative Work Fund of the Haas Foundation. Her 2014 article “The Quinoa Quarrel” won the James Beard Foundation Journalism Award for writing on Food Politics, Policy and the Environment. She lives in Northern California.