Jori Lewis

Biography

Jori Lewis writes narrative nonfiction that explores how people interact with their environments. Her reports and essays have been published in The Atlantic, Orion, and The New York Review of Books, among others, and she is the editor in chief of Adi Magazine, a literary magazine of global politics. Lewis has received a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant and a Silvers Grant. She is also the author of Slaves for Peanuts: A Story of Conquest, Liberation, and a Crop That Changed History (New Press, 2022), which won a James Beard Book Award and the Harriet Tubman Prize.

See Work

ESSAYS

Embracing Okra

By Jori Lewis ,  Illustration by Hélène Baum-Owoyele

In the years when I lived full-time in Senegal, I would make a trip to the United States once or twice a year to see my parents in Illinois, staying for a couple of weeks or sometimes a month. Soon after my arrival, they would cajole me...

Vibrant bowl of okra stew
REPORTING / Winter 2010

Rough Seas: Senegal’s Threatened Fisheries

By Jori Lewis ,  Photography by Randy Olson

In the late afternoon, the Soumbe-dioune Market in Dakar is mostly empty—populated by women rolling peanuts into bags as snacks, a few people brewing up vats of Cafe Touba (a spiced and sugary coffee), and others wiping down their cleaning...