Jennifer Trainer Thompson
With several hundred thousand books and posters in print, Jennifer Trainer Thompson has written more than sixteen books, including The Fresh Egg Cookbook, Hot Sauce!, Beyond Einstein (co-authored with Michio Kaku), and Jump Up and Kiss Me: Spicy Vegetarian Cooking, among others. Nominated for three James Beard awards and dubbed the “Queen of Hot” by Associated Press, she’s recognized as a leader in the spicy foods movement for her cookbooks and the hot sauce posters that she created, which have been featured everywhere from Playboy Magazine to Good Morning America.
Her books have drawn acclaim in the national press, and she’s been on hundreds of talk shows, including Live with Regis, CNN, and Good Morning America. The chef and creator of Jump Up and Kiss Me, an all-natural line of spicy sauces, she is passionate about spicy foods, and has followed her own personal “Trail of Flame,” speaking at festivals and in the media about hot foods, serving as guest chef at Hot Nights at restaurants in Boston, Philadelphia, and the Berkshires, and even going so far as to try Armageddon Sauce at a bar in the Adirondacks that’s accessible only by snowmobile in the winter.
A journalist for over 20 years, Jennifer writes about topics that interest her – science, food, travel, art, and lifestyle – for The New York Times, Travel & Leisure, Omni, Discover, Harvard Magazine among others, and has garnered a reputation for sniffing out trends. She wrote the first objective book on the commercial nuclear power controversy (Nuclear Power: Both Sides), and co-authored a popular book about scientists’ quest for the unified field theory (Beyond Einstein) when the superstring theory was proposed in 1987. She wrote the first national story about the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) for The New York Times in 1987, and was so taken by the idea of establishing a contemporary art museum in an abandoned mill complex in a small New England city that she asked the fledgling institution’s founding director Joseph Thompson for a job. Thompson hired her to become MASS MoCA’s founding development director, and several years later married her. She and her husband Joe live in western Massachusetts with their two children. Family and family traditions have always been important to her, which led to write The Joy of Family Traditions.
Her books have drawn acclaim in the national press, and she’s been on hundreds of talk shows, including Live with Regis, CNN, and Good Morning America. The chef and creator of Jump Up and Kiss Me, an all-natural line of spicy sauces, she is passionate about spicy foods, and has followed her own personal “Trail of Flame,” speaking at festivals and in the media about hot foods, serving as guest chef at Hot Nights at restaurants in Boston, Philadelphia, and the Berkshires, and even going so far as to try Armageddon Sauce at a bar in the Adirondacks that’s accessible only by snowmobile in the winter.
A journalist for over 20 years, Jennifer writes about topics that interest her – science, food, travel, art, and lifestyle – for The New York Times, Travel & Leisure, Omni, Discover, Harvard Magazine among others, and has garnered a reputation for sniffing out trends. She wrote the first objective book on the commercial nuclear power controversy (Nuclear Power: Both Sides), and co-authored a popular book about scientists’ quest for the unified field theory (Beyond Einstein) when the superstring theory was proposed in 1987. She wrote the first national story about the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) for The New York Times in 1987, and was so taken by the idea of establishing a contemporary art museum in an abandoned mill complex in a small New England city that she asked the fledgling institution’s founding director Joseph Thompson for a job. Thompson hired her to become MASS MoCA’s founding development director, and several years later married her. She and her husband Joe live in western Massachusetts with their two children. Family and family traditions have always been important to her, which led to write The Joy of Family Traditions.
