Welcome to Kitchn's series Kitchn Crush, where we highlight some of the coolest, most inspiring people in food you need to know about right now.
When she set out to write a cookbook about the food she grew up eating, more than anything, author and storyteller Von Diaz wanted to do it justice. "It was never going to be, like, 15 Spicy-Light Puerto Rican Recipes. That book was never going to come out of me," she says. Instead, she wrote Coconuts & Collards, which pays homage to her Puerto Rican roots and the complicated ways in which they intersect with the Southern dishes of her childhood in Atlanta, Georgia.
Von is a storyteller first: She has worked as a reporter, editor, producer, story consultant, and writer for almost every imaginable medium (think: radio, web, film documentary, and cookbooks). These days she's a lead story producer over at Google, where she heads up a documentary team. It's safe to say that she has the art of storytelling down to a science.
I talked to Von more about her cookbook, the recipes that shaped her, and the stories that need to be told — and by whom.
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