Joan Cirillo, an educator and award-winning journalist for 27 years, writes about food, kids' cooking, and family lifestyles for national magazines, newspapers, and the Internet. Her latest book is The Complete Idiot's Guide to Cooking with Kids. She has made numerous television appearances about family cooking. Her career has included positions as a staff writer for The Associated Press in New York and the Gannett Westchester newspapers, and as an assistant professor of journalism at New York University.
Cirillo began focusing on kids' cooking as an outgrowth of her own kitchen experiences with her children. As a columnist for Barney Family magazine, she began developing recipes for family cooking. She teaches kids' and adult cooking classes, and participated in launching a garden classroom and kids' cooking classes in the Portland public schools. She is an active member and former chairwoman of the Kids in the Kitchen Committee for the International Association of Culinary Professionals; a food and nutrition educator with the Oregon State University Extension Service; and a board member of the Portland Culinary Alliance. She is author of The Westchester Book, a guidebook to Westchester County, New York.
A native New Yorker, she moved with her family to the Pacific Northwest in the early '90s and lives and cooks with her husband, Roger, and two daughters, Julia and Lizzie, in Portland.