About

Christina Cooke is associate editor at Civil Eats, a daily news source covering the American food system, and a freelance magazine writer who writes about people, place, culture, food and agriculture systems, and social and environmental justice. She was awarded a James Beard Media Award for investigative journalism in 2023 for her work on Civil Eats’ Injured and Invisible series uncovering the lack of protections for workers in animal agriculture. For seven years, she taught courses for the now defunct Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

In her work with Civil Eats, Cooke writes and edits stories about food and agriculture with an eye toward social justice and environmental sustainability. In this role, she has written about youth flipping a prison into a sustainable farm, voter suppression in North Carolina's hog country, farmers prioritizing animal welfare standards, and the waste produced by factory farms.

As a freelance writer, Cooke finds herself drawn to tell stories at the fringes of society, about people who are offbeat and unconventional, passionate and obsessed, and masters of their own, very specialized domains. She has written about an old-school book scout for The New Yorker, Portland’s naked bike ride and the concept of repair cafes for The Atlantic, the love lives of captive African penguins for The New York Times, pilgrimages to lost Smoky Mountain cemeteries for Oxford American, a quality-obsessed cartographer for High Country News, by-hand custom shoemakers for 1859 Oregon’s Magazine, and the concept of Missed Connections for Willamette Week. Cooke hopes her writing makes readers curious about people and places they might have overlooked before, puts faces on complex social, cultural, and environmental issues and deepens her readers’ understanding of their connections to one another and place.

Before striking out on her own, Cooke worked two years as a staff writer at the Chattanooga Times Free Press in Tennessee covering K-12 education and such topics as school board decisions and teenage pregnancy. She won the newspaper a first-place award from the state press association for the breadth and quality of her coverage.

Cooke holds a BA in English from Davidson College and an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Portland State University, and she studied in the documentary writing program at the Salt Institute of Documentary Studies. She teaches interviewing and nonfiction writing courses at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

In 2007 and 2008, Cooke lived and worked in Torres del Paine National Park in the Chilean Patagonia, at the far southern tip of South America, where she immersed herself in the Chilean culture—all the while, keeping a travel blog called Out to See.

She lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina, with her husband, two young children, cat, and dog, where she spends her spare time riding her bicycle, running trails through the woods, and sitting around the fire pit in her backyard.