Presenter Profile
Jax Peters Lowell
Eating (and reading) well is the best revenge…
In 1995, a little-known book appeared that would change the lives of tens of thousands of celiacs and put celiac disease on the national radar screen. The book was Against the Grain (Henry Holt, New York).
The author was Jax Lowell and it’s hard to find a celiac today who doesn’t have a dog-eared copy of this landmark in celiac literature quoted in the Newsweek article, “The Perils of Pasta,” featured on the Food Network program, In Food Today, the New York Times, and National Public Radio.
People took her cheeky and slightly eccentric style to heart, to school, out to dinner and on vacation. We cried a little and learned to laugh, some of us for the first time. Armed with a new sense of assertion, we went to dinner parties without fear, sailed into restaurant kitchens, said no gluten in 18 languages and used her assertiveness training to get friends, family and neighborhood chefs eating out of our hands.
Jax taught us to stand up to the people who didn’t get it, and to take our full share of life’s pleasures. We’ve never felt quite so alone again.
Now Jax gives us, not one but two new gluten-free classics in-the-making.
No More Cupcakes & Tummy Aches is the charming tale of Izzie O’Brien, a diminutive celiac who learns that being special is what really makes us tall.
With beautiful illustrations by Jane Kirkwood, a foreword by Dr. Alessio Fasano, and a real-life cupcake recipe designed just for the book by Whole Foods Market Gluten-Free Bakehouse founder Lee Tobin, this is a story that will inspire the littlest celiacs for generations to come.
The Gluten-Free Bible with foreword by Dr. Anthony J. DiMarino, Jr. was published in 2006 by Henry Holt, and it really is the bible for living and loving every aspect of the gluten-free life.
With chapters like Sex and The Celiac, Mama’s Little Baby Can’t Have Shortenin’ Bread, and The Seven-Year Itch and Other Associated Conditions, it is the definitive guide to negotiating the brave new world of the celiac. There’s even a disaster plan and the world’s first gluten-free crossword puzzle.
Prior to writing books full time, Jax was chief creative officer of Foote, Cone Belding Philadelphia and was named one of the best and brightest women in advertising by Ad Age Magazine.
Gluten-free since 1981, she is the author of the powerful and critically praised novel Mothers (St. Martin’s Press). A prize-winning poet, she is currently at work on a memoir and makes her home in Philadelphia in a former bread factory.