Margaret McLeod Leef writes about food and the places we come from.
 

After college, she interned at Eating Well Magazine in Vermont, then returned to her native West Virginia to serve as Managing Editor of West Virginia Quarterly, where her profiles of West Virginians earned regional awards.

Four children and two decades later, she came back to writing through food—which turned out to hold everything she wanted to say.
 

Her column appears regularly in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Charleston Gazette-Mail. Her audio stories air on Inside Appalachia, the award-winning podcast about modern Appalachian life. She founded Charleston Reads, the city's first city-wide reading initiative.

Margaret gives lectures about "Food Writing as Memoir" and "The Art of the Interview—How to Get People to Really Talk." .Recent talks include the University of Charleston and Lafayette College. She also hosts community forums and live interviews.
 

Currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Stonecoast (University of Southern Maine), she is developing a West Virginia food anthology—not the punchline version, the real one.
 

Margaret grew up in Charleston, West Virginia, left, and came back.