Lisa Vang
Lisa Vang was born in Brooklyn Park and raised in a house where rice cookers never cooled down. As the daughter of Hmong refugees, she learned to read a neighborhood by its smells and to treat food as a kind of cartography. Her essays — somewhere between personal reflection and deep-fried confessional — unravel what it means to eat at the edges: of cities, of communities, of culture. Lisa’s writing explores the soft power of dive food — the way a battered hot dog or a dubious corn fritter can carry memory, tension, and comfort all at once. She has a gift for turning meals into mirrors, and even the worst ones leave a reflection worth thinking about.