Martha McCray Wallace was born in Cleveland Ohio, and currently resides in Clarkston, Georgia. A self-described contented mother of five heartbeats and Nana of eight grandangels, Martha is the recipient of the 2013 Helen Friese/Village Writers Award for her poem Will’s House. She graduated from Georgia Perimeter College where she majored in journalism.
Seeking to continue to perfect her writing skills, she attended and graduated from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia and won the Janet Newman Preston Creative Writing Prize for Nonfiction in 2015 as well as had several poems published in Nandi Magazine.
A Sampling of Life, One Taste at a Time: A Food Memoir
With insight, wit, common sense, and mouth-watering descriptions, comes a food memoir that takes place over many years, on different continents, and at kitchen tables across the Deep South and Midwestern America.
Part cookbook, part time machine, family recipes for Pig Pickin’ Cake, savory rib roast, hot sticky wings, Myesha’s Grape Salad and the stories behind them are shared – these are but a few of the dishes in a juicy repertoire that begins in the author’s childhood.
The former owner of a baking company, Wallace takes readers on flights to exciting destinations in Spain and Ghana; however, her life is far from being a cakewalk. Her memoir is interwoven with painful and poignant moments, like her mother’s death and disappearance of her beloved brother Tone Tone, who she’s still searching for in between bites, sips and chapters.
A Sampling of Life, One Taste at a Time invites the reader to prepare its dishes and sink their teeth into what it means to recreate wonderful meals shared with elders, siblings and friends…and if you happen to come across Tone tone, the author’s long lost brother, be sure to tell him there is an empty placeholder at Martha’s table.
