Dana Goodyear

Coming Up

Dana Goodyear began at Yale University, where she served as Managing Editor of The New Journal until 1998. Even in that early chapter, there is a sense of a writer learning not just how to shape copy, but how to calibrate a publication’s voice, pace, and sense of possibility. The editorial discipline implied by that role would become a through line in a career marked by range: exacting yet curious, structurally alert yet open to surprise. Since 2007, she has been a staff writer of The New Yorker, a tenure that reflects both consistency and evolution. Over the years, she has built a body of work that moves with confidence across subjects and forms, while still carrying the unmistakable stamp of careful reporting and literary attention. Today she is also co-founder of Figment, teaches in the master of Professional Writing program of University of Southern California, and is writer and host of the podcast Lost Hills of Lost Hills since 2021. Each of these roles points to a writer equally invested in making work, shaping it, and passing on craft—whether in the classroom, in a collaborative venture, or through a podcast format that invites voice and atmosphere to do much of the storytelling.

Where They Are Now

At The New Yorker, she remains a staff writer. It is a simple sentence, but it carries the weight of a substantial literary home: a place where Goodyear’s reporting can unfold with patience, nuance, and the confidence that comes from sustained editorial fellowship. Her position there keeps her at the center of one of the most influential magazines in American letters, where she continues to write with the measured seriousness and stylistic control that have defined her path.

Signature

Dana Goodyear is associated with Anything That Moves: Renegade Chefs. The title itself suggests motion, energy, and a taste for edges rather than the center—an apt association for a writer drawn to the shifting terrain of food, culture, and the people who challenge inherited ideas about how taste, access, and creativity should work.

In Their Words “What's happening in the food world is that chefs and diners are demanding greater variety and less oversight and our regulatory system is not set up for that.” The line captures Goodyear’s eye for pressure points: the tension between desire and structure, between the momentum of change and the slower machinery of regulation. It also reflects the kind of listening that animates her work, a sensitivity to the ways culinary culture is always negotiating freedom, constraint, and the systems that shape what reaches the table. “I think that's a really new thing in this country—that there are people who are activists around access to food and ingredients and food experiences.” Here, Goodyear frames food not only as pleasure or profession, but as a field of civic energy and cultural claims. The remark suggests a writer attentive to emergence—new forms of advocacy, new ways of thinking about access, and new conversations around what it means to participate fully in food culture. In her hands, the subject becomes larger than appetite alone: it becomes a lens on change, values, and the evolving shape of public life.