The Team
Meet Our Authors
Jessica Kehinde Ngo
Season 1 Author / Editor-in-Chief
Jessica Kehinde Ngo is an identical twin with a Nigerian-American background. After completing the manuscript for her food memoir Half Nigerian / Fully Plantain, she felt called to create a press to publish Black food stories like hers outside of the constraints of traditional publishing...thus Jollof & Jambalaya Press was born. Ngo's writing has appeared in publications such as Epicurious, Whetstone, TASTE, The Counter, Cuisine Noir, Eaten, The James Beard Foundation blog, and The New York Times Tiny Love Stories Column. She was a 2022 Legacy Network Advisee for the James Beard Foundation, a 2023 Winner of an International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) Food Writing Award, and a 2025 Food Writing Grantee of the Edna Lewis Foundation. She is currently an associate professor in the Liberal Studies department at Otis College of Art & Design in Los Angeles and spends her free time frying plantains and enjoying the beach with her husband and sons.
Book coming Fall 2026!
Dr. Khari Chanel Johnson
Season 1 Author
Dr. Khari Chanel Johnson is a steward of stories who believes life should be lived around a table, yet prefers when other people are doing the cooking. Growing up, the dinner table was her family's daily gathering place. Her mother's Louisiana fried chicken and her father's Swedish pancakes became a language of love. Her food obsessions have taken her from the dining halls at UCLA to a culinary internship in the South of France, into Wolfgang Puck's kitchens, to eleven countries as a missionary, and then to Italy to get a master's in Gastronomy. Her love of food runs so deep that she got a whole PhD in Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill just to study it, all to confirm, on paper, what she already knew in her bones: that Black women cultivate joy at the kitchen table. She is currently hunting for the best smashed burger in New York City with her husband, spends way too much time looking at restaurant menus, and is already planning her next meal.
Book coming Spring 2027!
Charity Qalutaq Blanchett
Season 1 Author
Charity Qalutaq Blanchett is an Alaskan Native and fraternal twin. Yup'ik and Black, she carries the name Qalutaq, her heirloom — Dipping Spoon. In Yugtun, her name holds a whole teaching: from one dip, you serve others. She is the Founder and Executive Director of Dipping Spoon Foundation, an Indigenous-led nonprofit teaching Alaska Native youth in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta to see their own foodways as inheritance rather than footnote. She is a former Mellon Foundation Fellow, Vital Voices Fellow, and a James Beard Legacy Network Fellow. With her dog Tuntu, Charity now calls New Orleans, Louisiana, home. She is currently pursuing a B.A. in General Legal Studies at Tulane University, building toward a future in Indigenous intellectual property law, while continuing to lead Dipping Spoon Foundation from afar.
Book coming Summer 2027!