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Stephanie Teasley

Stephanie Teasley is a writer, editor, and storyteller living in Palm Springs, California. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles and has worked across journalism, editorial, narrative design, education, and digital content. Her work explores culture, history, identity, and the stories people use to make sense of themselves and their communities.

Stephanie currently works as a Project Coordinator for the Global Food and Drink Initiative, where she researches and develops educational content, writes for digital platforms, and contributes to the development of an online resource center. She is also a freelance writer and has worked as a narrative designer for video games and as an editor for online literary publications.

Stephanie is a graduate of the Muses and Melanin Professional Writers Fellowship through California Humanities, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. When she's not writing, she enjoys playing video games, being a Trekkie, and spending time with her loved ones—both human and furry.

For inquiries, please email stephanieteasleywrites@gmail.com.

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Civil Rights Movement Restaurants: Part Three

For part three of our Culture Brief series that highlights restaurants going beyond serving food to help support the Civils Rights Movement, we’ll wrap up with two well-known Black-owned restaurants in Atlanta, each with its own unique history and significance.
Both of these establishments played important and distinct roles for activists, leaders, and the community, helping to shape the social and political landscape during a pivotal era.
In 1947, Lucy Jackson established Busy Bee Café, one of...
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Black Farmers and Black Land Loss in the US

In 1862, two major developments occurred in American history: the United States government created the Department of Agriculture and as a result, the Homestead Act was passed. This included Black farmers, although their path to land ownership would remain challenging due to racial discrimination and unequal access to agricultural resources.
The Homestead Act granted any American access to ownership of land, or homesteads, from the public domain if they lived on and improved the land for a specif...
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Cape Verdean Food, Survival and the Making of Creole Culture

Cape Verde, officially known as the Republic of Cabo Verde, is part of an island chain located off the coast of West Africa. The archipelago was uninhabited until Portuguese explorers arrived there in the 15th century, establishing Ribeira Grande, now called Cidade Velha, which became the first European colonial town built in the tropics.
The city is located on the southern coast of the island of Santiago. In 1510, Santiago had 160 settlers and 30 enslaved people, but by 1580, there were 14,000...
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Maroon Communities and How They Made the Landscape Home

The history of Maroon communities and their significant contributions to Black history, culinary traditions and cultural heritage are still seen worldwide today. The first English record of the word “maroon” was in 1666, with some scholars arguing that it came from the French word “marron” or the Spanish word “cimarrón,” both meaning “runaway slave” or “wild” and was given to the enslaved Africans during the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
American anthropologist and historian Richard Price published...
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Civil Rights Movement Restaurants: Part Two

Black-owned restaurants have played a lasting role in the Civil Rights Movement, becoming places where food and activism intersect. Beyond serving meals, these businesses supported their respective communities and provided spaces where people could gather, connect, and work towards change.
Here is part two of a list of Black-owned restaurants with ties to the Civil Rights Movement, with all keeping their legacies going forward by serving new generations of diners.
Lannie Travis and her husband,...
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The Black History Behind St. Mary’s Stuffed Ham

St. Mary’s County is located in Southern Maryland, forming a peninsula bordered by the Potomac River, the Patuxent River, and the Chesapeake Bay. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the region housed tobacco plantations that depended on hand labor from enslaved people from West and West-Central Africa.
As mentioned in our previous Cultural Briefs, the enslaved were forced to innovate with the scraps and less desirable meats given to them, which over generations has come to be seen as a delicacy. One...
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Restaurants That Played A Role in the Civil Rights Movement

During the Civil Rights Movement (1954 – 1968), many Black-owned restaurants doubled as safe havens for activists and leaders, providing sustenance and sometimes serving as hideouts. These restaurants stood strong during challenging and violent times and are still in operation today.
Here is part one of a list of Black-owned restaurants with ties to the Civil Rights Movement.
During the 1910s, Jones Bar-B-Q Diner opened its doors in Marianna, Arkansas. Established by pitmaster Walter Jones, Jone...
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African Diaspora's Impact on Traditional Mexican Food

The foundational history of traditional Mexican food is deeply intertwined with systemic resistance. Long before the Underground Railroad or the Jamaican slave markets reached their peaks, Mexico was home to one of the earliest successful maroon revolutions in the Americas.
A West African prince named Yanga led a massive enslaved rebellion against the sugarcane lowlands of Veracruz, establishing a fortified maroon community called a palenque that the Spanish military could not defeat. This for...
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The Food Science of Ancestral Cooking Techniques

Throughout our educational blogs, we’ve covered ancient African cooking techniques that are still in use today. The one-pot meals, simmering bitter greens with a protein, slow-cooking meats over a fire, and wrapping proteins or dough in large plant leaves and then steaming them are examples from the diaspora.
However, many other transformative cooking techniques rooted in ancient food science were introduced to the Americas by African people.
Culinary historian Dr. Jessica B. Harris wrote her aw...
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Plants and Foodways That Guided the Underground Railroad

Although food and identity in the African diaspora are closely linked to widespread violence, their culinary traditions are not just a passive reaction to systemic racism but a deliberate form of resistance, survival, and cultural preservation.
In the United States, food and identity among the enslaved connected them to their ancestral roots, which they passed on to the next generation. Soul food serves as a primary example of this intersection, as contemporary culinary dishes and medicinal orig...
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The Culinary Masterpieces of Caribbean Food

Thirteen nations and dependent territories, including island nations, make up the region known as the Caribbean, which spans the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. Due to the generations of heavy colonization, Caribbean food and its foodways are an amalgamation of West African, Creole, Amerindian, European, Latin American, Indian/South Asian, Chinese, Javanese/Indonesian, North American, and Middle Eastern cuisines.
Before colonization, the Caribbean islands housed a massive population of dee...
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How Gullah Geechee Preserved the Soul of Black Foodways

In the United States, Gullah Geechee people are direct descendants of the Rice Coast Africans, the largest group of enslaved Africans stolen during the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade. Because of their advanced agricultural knowledge, over 50,000 Rice Coast Africans were targeted and systematically concentrated to work on rice, indigo, and Sea Island cotton plantations along the lower Atlantic coast.
The enslavement of the Rice Coast Africans was uniquely defined by geographic and social isolation. T...
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Roots of Louisiana Creole Cuisine in the United States

Louisiana Creole cuisine, typically referred to simply as “Creole” in the US, is rooted in Louisiana’s multicultural colonial history, drawing on French, Spanish, West African, Native American, Caribbean, and Southern influences.
In the kitchen, Creole cuisine and its mixed culture are known for layered flavors, seafood, and rice dishes, with the best-known being gumbo and jambalaya. In our Understanding Black Foodways blog post, we examined how enslaved Africans became architects of flavors and...
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How Freedom Seekers and Ancestral Roots Forged Soul Food

In the United States, soul food is a Black American cuisine with a social, ethnic, and political history. Its baseline directly stems from plantation food rations, where the enslaved were forced to transform discarded animal parts, like ham hocks, hog jowls, and intestines, into dense sustenance through prolonged cleaning and cooking, using salt, lard, and herbs from their gardens.
Across generations, greens, pork, cornmeal starches, legumes, and Indigenous crops like okra remain integral to sou...
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Seeds in Hair Debate: Oral Traditions Vs. The Colonial Archive

Oral traditions are the oldest form of storytelling, dating back to the time when humanity evolved to speak. Knowledge and history were passed down from the elder generations to the younger, and over time and circumstance, the history became legend, which, in some academic circles, became folklore.  For the Maroon communities in Suriname and Brazil, these “legends” are real and are the botanical blueprints of their survival.
The Portuguese began exploring and then colonizing West Africa in the m...
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The History of Black Foodways Through the Plate

Foodways in the social sciences refer to the ways food, culture, traditions, and history intersect and influence one another. This also extends to economic practices relating to how food is produced and the eating habits and culinary practices of a people, region, or historical period. Food is history, and its origins span millennia. As humanity evolved and grew, so did Black foodways.
Black foodways pertaining to the African diaspora carry deeply embedded cultural meaning and history, maintaine...
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History of Food Sovereignty in West Africa

The Neolithic Revolution was the era when early humanity transitioned from hunting and gathering to the domestication of plants and animals. While this period is linked with the Fertile Crescent starting around 10,000 BCE, it became a global phenomenon of independent innovation.
For ancient African civilizations, specifically those in West Africa, the Neolithic Revolution established them as major players in history. Until 1977, many attributed West Africa’s evolution solely to external factors,...
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West African Roots of Carolina Gold Rice

Carolina Gold rice is one of two rice species of Oryza sativa, also known as Asian cultivated rice, which was first domesticated in China between 13,500 and 8200 BCE.
The first recorded introduction to rice in America was in 1685 in Charleston, South Carolina. Referred to as Carolina Gold rice because of the golden color of the unhulled grains, it quickly turned South Carolina into a global trading hub by becoming the state’s largest cash crop. Rice plantation owners were among the wealthiest of...
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Ancestral Superfoods of the African Diaspora

The modern wellness industry goes through cycles of “discoveries,” like how hibiscus, moringa, and baobab have been pushed forward for the last few years as superfoods. It’s important to note that the word superfood is not a scientific term; it’s just a marketing word, but it doesn’t mean the foods aren’t powerful.
Proteins like salmon, leafy greens, nuts, and berries are packed with vitamins and minerals. However, hibiscus, moringa, and baobab aren’t just food in Africa. For millennia, they’ve...
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From Memory to Record: Saving Black Recipes

So much of Black history in America has been lost through time, violence, and circumstances. Among the many untold stories are the Black recipes born out of desperation and ingenuity, and passed down orally through the generations. This was necessary for the enslaved who were not allowed any education and had to rely on memory and oral communication.
Even after emancipation, the oral tradition stayed central. Recipes stayed locked in the minds of the elders, who are often the sole keepers of the...
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