Lisa M. Holmes

Lisa Holmes is a social worker, chef, educator, writer, chocolatier and mother of two young adult children. Her writing career began early with her first published work appearing in a locally produced magazine when she was 7, and her interest in feeding people began around the same time when she received her first Easy Bake Oven. A move to England and extensive European travel between the ages of 9 and 12 helped solidify her early culinary interests.

After graduating from Wellesley College with a degree in English she began her formal writing career as a travel journalist for Frommer's, authoring or co-authoring 11 guidebooks, including Paris, Amsterdam, New Orleans, San Francisco, New Mexico, and Maui. Traveling became an adventure in food, and it wasn't long before she traded her pen for a chef's knife and entered The Culinary Institute of America (CIA) where she received a degree in Culinary Arts, and as valedictorian of her class, was honored with the Waldorf Astoria Award for Academic Excellence and the President's Scholarship.

Not long after receiving her Culinary Arts degree, Holmes combined her writing and cooking skills and coauthored Bitter Harvest (Routledge, 2000) with Chef Ann Cooper and opened a small, artisan chocolate business. Other works by Holmes and Cooper include In Mother's Kitchen (Rizzoli, 2005) and Lunch Lessons (HarperCollins 2006). Lunch Lessons won an IACP cookbook award in 2007.

As an extension of her work on Lunch Lessons and Bitter Harvest, Holmes opened The Children's Culinary Academy on Cape Cod in Falmouth, MA, where she taught children (and sometimes adults) about cooking, with a focus on educating people about the importance of local, regional, seasonal, sustainable foodways. After several successful years running that program she transitioned to a local high school, where she taught for seven years, leading her ProStart Culinary Arts team to a state championship win in 2017.

Also in 2017 she completed a Masters Degree in Social Work and currently works in Community Behavioral Health and as a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker (LICSW) in private practice.

She continues to look for new adventures!