Kit Wohl is a cookbook author, photographer, graphics designer and artist. She also has worked with chefs, restaurants and hotels across the United States as the CEO of Wohl & Company, a New Orleans-based advertising, public relations and marketing firm.

After spending 25 years as the advertising, pr and marketing representative for the world-famous New Orleans restaurant Arnaud's, Kit drew from her passion for the culinary arts to produce the Arnaud's Restaurant Cookbook, which would eventually become the first of six such works.

Shortly after completion and national acclaim of the Arnaud's Restaurant Cookbook in 2005, she designed, photographed, researched and wrote the first four volumes of her New Orleans Classic restaurant series, each covering a different aspect of the city's traditional and mainstream cuisines-Desserts 2007, Seafood 2008, Appetizers 2008, and Gumbos and Soups to be published in January 2009.

The editors of Gourmet chose New Orleans Classic: Gumbos and Soups as the magazine's Cookbook of the Month for February 2009. Her sixth book, a 224-page collection of New Orleans oyster recipes, is scheduled for publication in 2009.

For each of her cookbooks, Kit chooses recipes from the repertoires of a wide range of restaurant kitchens and professional chefs. Each recipe is tested after it is adapted to home-kitchen standards, and each dish is illustrated in her books with one of her photographs.

"Cooking is an art and a form of creative expression," she says. "Food is distinctive in form, color, texture and flavor. The selection, preparation and presentation of a meal are as creative as any art project. Best of all, it nurtures both the body and the spirit."

Her energy and artistic talent have produced numerous awards for design and production in various fields. Among her professional accolades is a Clio Award, which is the advertising industry's equivalent of the Emmy. She was a longtime board member for the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, and has been active in many other of the city's civic, educational and charitable organizations.

Her versatility as a designer and artist is evident in her painting and her metal sculpture. The art critic of The Times-Picayune daily newspaper described her sculpture as "magical and fabulous."

Kit and Billy, her husband, live in New Orleans with a trio of Abyssinian cats.




Interview from FOREWORD Magazine

When did you start reading, and what did you like to read as a kid?
I don't know how old I was when I began to read; only that I can't remember not being able to read. As a child, Grimm's Fairy Tales was a constant treasure. So were the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series - my introduction to the notion that a book could be a mystery, a kind of puzzle that I could solve by reading. At eleven, I found Peyton Place in my mother's closet, read it (at eleven, this book was also a mystery to me, just another kind), and then the nuns had a collective heart attack when I brought the book to school. I went back to mysteries I could understand. For years (even after I grasped the "mysteries" in Peyton Place) my favorite sleuth was John D. McDonald's character, Travis Magee. I still have the original paperbacks.


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