About Andrea

Photo by Jenna Muirhead

Andrea Curtis is an award-winning writer and editor whose work has been published and translated around the world.

Her book, The Stop: How the Fight for Good Food Transformed a Community and Inspired a Movement, written with Nick Saul, is a bestseller and a winner of the Taste Canada Food Writing Award. It also won an Award of Merit at the Heritage Toronto Awards, and was nominated for the Toronto Book Award and the OLA Evergreen Award. Her first book, the critically acclaimed creative nonfiction work Into the Blue: Family Secrets and the Search for a Great Lakes Shipwreck (Random House) won the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction.

Andrea also writes for young people. Her YA novel, Big Water, is published by Orca Books. She is also the author of an ongoing series  of informational picture books from Groundwood Books that looks at urban systems and sustainability. The series includes A Forest in the City, City of Water, City Streets are for People  and the recently published City of Neighbors Her first fictional picture book is called Barnaby and it is published by Owlkids Books.  

Photo by Christie Esau

 

Andrea’s bestselling kids’ nonfiction What’s for Lunch? How Schoolchildren Eat Around the World  and Eat This! How Fast Food Marketing Gets You to Buy Junk (and how to fight back) are published by Red Deer Press. The latter was named one of the best books of the year by both Kirkus Review and School Library Journal. It was also an OLA Best Bet and nominated for the Red Cedar Book Award.

Her writing has appeared in Toronto Life, Cottage Life, Chatelaine, Canadian Geographic, Explore, This Magazine, Utne Reader, The Globe & Mail, The National Post and Today’s Parent, among other publications.

Andrea has written about everything from women’s health to neighbourhood change, from personalities in the literary world to those in the urban forest. Her writing has won six Canadian National Magazine Awards plus three that she shared with others. She has also won three International Regional Magazine Awards.

Before beginning to freelance full-time, Andrea was an editor at Toronto Life, Shift and editor-in-chief of This magazine, one of Canada’s oldest progressive magazines about politics and culture.

She also teaches creative writing to kids and volunteers on the board of Word-Play, a nonprofit community-based organization that is focused on the joy of reading and writing.

Andrea grew up in Barrie, Ontario. She’s a graduate of McGill University where she studied history. She lives in Toronto with her family.