ABOUT LISA

Lisa Donovan is a pastry chef and James Beard award winning writer. She’s weaved in and out of the restaurant industry, writing recipes and contributing to the larger annals of American baking with her equally reverent approach to both technique and heritage.

Lisa has helmed the pastry kitchens of some of the most important restaurants in the country and has kept her whole life afloat by making, writing on and thinking about food - including consulting, recipe development, selling pies out of the trunk of her car and creating the now retired yet really wonderful Buttermilk Road Sunday Suppers. Lisa now writes full time and is very glad for it.

Her first book, Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger is available now.

Purchase Here

Praise for Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger……

"Lisa Donovan’s writing has such intensity and assertiveness. It spikes the adrenaline and creates tension in a way that feels almost athletic. And it’s through this toned and visceral prose that we are forced to reckon with Lisa’s most essential recipe: that respect is bred from unflinching truth and raw honesty. In life, and on these pages, Lisa charts a path of personal growth with brave transparency, eloquently acknowledging that life’s greatest challenges are not circumstance, but a calling.”—Ashley Christensen, James Beard Award-winning chef

“The first time you meet Lisa you want to pull up a stool, pour a drink and listen to every story she has to tell. It turns out you don't need the stool or the drink. This is a woman you will be happy to get to know.” —Ruth Reichl, author of Save Me the Plums

"Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger is more than the story of a woman who finds her own voice in the patriarchal world of professional cooking. It’s also the story of making a life — a life of love, of community, of commitment to the flame of creativity that somehow manages to burn against all odds. Lisa Donovan has written nothing less than the story of making a life in our times.” —Margaret Renkl, author of Late Migrations

“Lisa Donovan is one of the country's great pastry chefs, but this isn't a story about food, really. It's about the strength of womanhood and motherhood. It's about staring down the betrayals that women face. And it's about the redemptive power, not of food itself, but of finding common cause in feeding others.”—Francis Lam, host, The Splendid Table

“A critique of the 'world that men made,' a pledge to the women who came before her, and a challenge to work in new ways, Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger blazes a path of self-discovery that manages, as great memoir must, to serve readers more than self. Lisa Donovan knows things we need to know.” —John T. Edge, author of The Potlikker Papers

“In Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger, Lisa Donovan writes a line I kept returning to: 'I had vigor, the kind you could taste.' I could taste the writing in this book. Her breathless descriptors conjure heat and possibility, her incisive memories capture the dank and earthen bits. To give a book life, a wise writer understands her myths must die. This book's heart is its truth, one woman's unyielding look in the mirror and well beyond it. Lisa's ultimate embrace of the human who stares back at her is a kind of freedom for us all.” —Osayi Endolyn, James Beard Award-winning writer

"Yes, it's about love, family, food, and one woman's personal and professional journey. But more than all that, Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger is about life force, the unquenchable flame within us that demands to survive and thrive. It could only be written by Lisa Donovan, and it should be read by everyone.” —Mary Laura Philpott, author of I Miss You When I Blink

"Lisa Donovan writes with a voice that is both bruised and tender in Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger. In tracing her path to food, Donovan honors the women who shaped her philosophy in the kitchen, reminding us of the necessity of women telling their stories in a world so eagerly determined to erase them. We are quite lucky to live in a world where Donovan has written her own story with such grace.” —Mayukh Sen, James Beard Award-winning writer

Lisa lives and writes from Nashville, TN. Her work has been featured in Food&Wine Magazine, The Washington Post, Saveur, and many other national publications. Her pastry recipes are featured in a thousand and one cookbooks including both of Sean Brock’s NYT’s bestselling cookbooks Heritage and South as well as Ronnie Lundy’s Victuals. She is available to travel for consulting and speaking engagements.

Literary representation / David Black at The David Black Agency