Amy Rogers is an award-winning writer, editor, independent press publisher, and popular workshop presenter. She has worked with hundreds of people who want to hone their skills and find satisfaction in their writing.
As a long-time journalist, she writes most often about food and culture. For 15 years, she covered topics ranging from pie contests to public policy for National Public Radio station WFAE. She has been a contributor for The Food Network, Salon, Business Insider, and The Bucket. Her work has appeared in numerous print publications, including the Charlotte Observer, design magazine American Bungalow, and the literary magazine Oxford American.
For her ongoing work that explores the power of food to build cross-cultural understanding, she was awarded a 2020-21 Arts and Science Council Creative Renewal Fellowship.
Books she has written include Hungry for Home: Stories of Food from Across the Carolinas and Red Pepper Fudge and Blue Ribbon Biscuits. Rogers is co-author of The Black America Series: Charlotte and Charlotte: Its Historic Neighborhoods. She is co-editor of the literary anthologies No Hiding Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Charlotte-Area Writers, and Novello: Ten Years of Great American Writing, which was a finalist for a national Independent Publisher Book Award.
Her essays appear in multiple anthologies. These include her profile of farmer-turned-novelist Dori Sanders in Cornbread Nation 1: The Best of Southern Food Writing. Her essay, “A Taste of Equality,” was featured in the anthology 27 Views of Charlotte: The Queen City in Prose and Poetry.
She was a founder and publisher of Novello Festival Press, the only library-sponsored literary publisher in the nation. With titles in literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry from emerging and established writers, NFP put more than 300 writers into print, many for the first time, and sold nearly 50,000 books during Rogers’ 10-year tenure.
After a decade of advocacy, she was awarded at Central Piedmont Community College (CPCC) the Irene Blair Honeycutt Legacy Award for outstanding service in support of local and regional writers.
She received a SELA President’s Award, given by the Southeast Library Association in recognition of the person outside the library profession who has done the most for libraries. She was selected to participate in the NC Arts Council Touring Artists program and has been a member of the board of directors of the Publishers’ Association of the South (PAS), where she was elected to serve a term as vice-president.
Rogers was the first recipient of an Arts and Science Council Creative Artist Fellowship for non-fiction writing. She was chosen a Writer in Residence at the non-profit Wildacres Center, and each year since 2001, she has served on the Artist Residency selection committee for the organization.
Her reporting for alternative news-weekly Creative Loafing won multiple awards from the NC Working Press Association. One of these recognized “Rising from the Ashes,” which profiled survivors of the Imperial Foods fire in Hamlet, NC; the essay became part of the instructional curriculum at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte.
Rogers has presented programs at Johnson & Wales University, the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, the NC Literary Festival, the SC Book Festival, the Southern Voices Symposium, the Hub City Writers Project, and others. She has led numerous educational and outreach programs in schools, colleges, arts centers, libraries, and with incarcerated populations.
Additionally, she has judged the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) cookbook awards and the Scholastic Writing Awards for multiple years.
Since 2022, she has volunteered at the Victory House Community Resource Center Food Bank. She has been a youth mentor at Big Brothers Big Sisters, where her chapter twice nominated her for “Big of the Year.” She has served on committees for the CPCC Literary Festival and the NC Writers’ Network, where she is on the critique faculty. She has also served on the board of directors for the Women’s National Book Association-Charlotte and the Second Ward High School National Alumni Foundation, a non-profit that documents the African-American history of Mecklenburg County, NC.
Rogers is a member of the Authors Guild and the Society of Professional Journalists.
A native of Detroit, Michigan, she has lived in large cities of more than 1 million and tiny towns with just a few hundred people. She studied writing at Queens College (now Queens University) and currently divides her time between Florida and the Carolinas.
She is currently at work on a reported memoir about people facing and solving problems of hunger and housing injustice.