Amy Rogers is an award-winning writer, editor and independent press publisher. 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 a frequent food and culture commentator for National Public Radio station WFAE, and for the station’s online magazine, “WFAEats: All Things Food and Culture.” She is a current contributor for The Food Network. Her work was included in Cornbread Nation 1: The Best of Southern Food Writing. Her profile of North Carolina author Lee Smith was included in The North Carolina Century: Tar Heels Who Made a Difference, 1900-2000. Both books were published by University of North Carolina Press. Her essay, “A Taste of Equality,” was featured in the anthology 27 Views of Charlotte: The Queen City in Prose and Poetry (Eno Press).

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, during Rogers’ ten-year tenure, NFP put more than 300 writers into print, many for the first time, and sold nearly 50,000 books.

After a decade of advocacy, Rogers was awarded at Central Piedmont Community College the Irene Blair Honeycutt Legacy Award for outstanding service in support of local and regional writers.

She was a past winner of the 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 North Carolina Touring Artists  program, sponsored by the North Carolina Arts Council. Rogers has been a member of the board of directors of the Publishers’ Association of the South (PAS) and was elected to serve a term as vice-president of that organization.

She was the recipient of a Creative Artist Fellowship from the Arts and Science Council, and was the first person to receive the award for non-fiction writing. She was chosen a Writer in Residence at the non-profit Wildacres Center, and each year since 2001 has served on the Artist Residency selection committee for the organization.

Her reporting for Creative Loafing, an alternative news-weekly, has won multiple awards from the N.C. Working Press Association. Rogers’ work has appeared in numerous other publications, including the Charlotte Observer, design magazine American Bungalow and the literary magazine Oxford American.

Rogers is co-author of The Black America Series: Charlotte, Seasons of Charlotte and Charlotte: Its Historic Neighborhoods, now in its fifth printing. 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.

She has been a speaker and workshop presenter at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, Tennessee; the North Carolina Literary Festival; the South Carolina Book Festival; the Southern Voices Symposium in Birmingham, Alabama; the Hub City Writers Project in Spartanburg, S.C.; the Charlotte Center for Literary Arts; the Novello Festival of Reading, and the Central Piedmont Community College Literary Festival. Rogers has led numerous educational and outreach programs in schools, colleges, arts centers, local and regional libraries, and with incarcerated populations.

Her additional volunteer activities include Big Brothers Big Sisters, where her chapter twice nominated her for “Big of the Year,” the National Transplant Assistance Fund, and serving on committees for the Central Piedmont Community College Literary Festival and the North Carolina Writers’ Network. She has also served on the board of directors for the Women’s National Book Association-Charlotte, the women’s lifestyle magazine Skirt! and the Second Ward High School National Alumni Foundation, a non-profit advocacy group that works to document the African-American history of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina.

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). She currently divides her time between Florida and North Carolina.