Kayla Stewart is a James Beard Award-winning food and travel journalist and cookbook author. Her work has been featured inThe New York Times, The Guardian, Saveur, Travel + Leisure, Food & Wine, and others.

Kayla served as a Fulbright Scholar in Indonesia and was awarded the UC Berkeley-11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism Fellowship. Her piece, “The Sweetest Harvest,” won the 2023 James Beard Foundation Profile award. She has been featured in the Best American Food and Travel Writing Series, and her stories, “Teach a Man to Fish,” and “An African Food Legacy Endures in Palenque, Colombia,” were anthologized in 2023 and 2025, respectively. She is the co-author, with Emily Meggett, of the James Beard-nominated, New York Times bestselling cookbook, “Gullah Geechee Home Cooking: Recipes from the Matriarch of Edisto Island,” and is working on a cookbook with chef Christopher Williams about Black cuisine in Texas for Ten Speed Press.

Kayla was formerly an adjunct professor at New York University, where she taught a course on food writing. She received her B.A. in Journalism from the University of Houston, and holds a joint master’s degree in International Relations and Journalism from New York University. She is based in New Orleans.