Marnie Hanel is a freelance magazine writer based in Portland, Oregon. If you're only going to read one thing she's ever written, let's make it the one with the octopus attack. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Food & Wine, W, Vanity Fair, Departures, Marie Claire, Town & Country, New York and Sunset. She grew up in Seattle, attended UNC-Chapel Hill as a Morehead-Cain scholar, earned a master's in journalism from Columbia University, and spent the lion's share of her twenties on the editorial staff of Vanity Fair. She co-wrote the independent feature film Missed Connections (2013), which won the Audience Award at the Gen Art Festival and Savannah Film Festival, and co-authored two cookbooks, The Picnic: Recipes and Inspiration from Basket to Blanket (Artisan, 2015), which won the IACP Cookbook Award for General Cooking, and The Campout Cookbook: Inspired Recipes for Cooking Around the Fire and Under the Stars (Artisan, 2018.)

She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband, Jamie Bordley, and three small sons: James, Calvin, and Dash.