Food historian Jessica B. Harris has cooked with Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison and James Baldwin. While working at Essence magazine, she also had a relationship with Sam Floyd, Baldwin’s best friend and neighbor. Harris recounts this confluence of acquaintances — the conversations, the food and the records they played — in her memoir, “My Soul Looks Back.”
Befriending Angelou, Baldwin, and Morrison in 1970s New York
After penning “High on the Hog,” Jessica B. Harris decided her next work would be a memoir, recounting her youth living in New York City in the 1970s surrounded by the most revered Black voices of their generation. Photo courtesy of Scribner.
