Kayla Stewart is a James Beard Award-winning food and travel journalist, cookbook author, and a Senior Editor at Eater. Her work has been featured in Eater, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Travel + Leisure, Food & Wine, and others.

Kayla served as a Fulbright Scholar in Indonesia and was awarded the UC Berkeley-11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism Fellowship. Her piece, “The Sweetest Harvest,” won the 2023 James Beard Foundation Profile Award, and her story, “Teach a Man to Fish,” was anthologized in the 2023 edition of Best American Food Writing. She is the co-author, with Emily Meggett, of the James Beard-nominated, New York Times bestselling cookbook, “Gullah Geechee Home Cooking: Recipes from the Matriarch of Edisto Island,” and is working on a cookbook with chef Christopher Williams about Black cuisine in Texas for Ten Speed Press.

Kayla was formerly an adjunct professor at New York University, where she taught a course on food writing. She received her B.A. in Journalism from the University of Houston, and holds a joint master’s degree in International Relations and Journalism from New York University. She is currently based in Houston.

Kayla is represented by Cindy Uh at the Creative Artists Agency.