Books
The Hungry Season
A Journey of War, Love, and Survival
Little, Brown and Company, 2023
“This intimate work of narrative nonfiction begins in 1975 Laos, with a message spoken softly between villagers: “The Americans have deserted us.” Just 11 years old, Ia Moua, the youngest daughter of Hmong rice farmers, will go on to elude the fate of so many in her circumstances — arranged marriage, Communist rule, starvation — by escaping her country. Hamilton, a writer and photographer, follows the girl’s path as she spends 15 years in refugee camps and builds a new, yet intensely familiar, life as a rice farmer in California.
— New York Times, “16 Books to Read in September”
“The Hungry Season is a deeply reported and intricately narrated story of displacement, homelessness, and identity. Hamilton crafts an intimate, searing portrait of one marginalized woman, devastated by politics and poverty, patriarchy and tradition, wars and colonialism, and the resilient way she finds solace and strength in one thing that brings her home: rice.”
— Suki Kim
Deeply Rooted:
Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness
Counterpoint Press, 2009
“The food revolution taking place in this country cannot be truly successful without an agricultural revolution. We must inspire our farmers and create millions more of them. The extraordinary farmers Lisa Hamilton profiles in Deeply Rooted embody the future of American agriculture.”
— Alice Waters
“In a time when agribusiness and the global economy are making the rules, and when most people of the land are striving to be obedient, these people have had the courage to use their own intelligence in their own places. They have been appropriately rewarded for their independence, and readers of this book will be rewarded also. As for me, when I read of the Podoll family’s thinking about local adaptation and their effort ‘to get the maximum from the minimum,’ I wanted to stand up and shout.”
— from a letter to the author by Wendell Berry
Know That What You Eat You Are: The Best Food Writing from Harper’s Magazine
Franklin Square Press, 2017
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015, edited by Rebecca Skloot
Mariner Books, 2016