Crescent Dragonwagon (is that her real name?) is the author of 48 books, including cookbooks, children's books, poetry collections, and novels. A former restaurateur / innkeeper, she and her late husband, Ned Shank, owned  Dairy Hollow House. Despite its out-of-the-way location in the Ozark Mountain village of Eureka Springs, Arkansas, the inn's "nouveau'Zarks" cuisine received raves from Gourmet, Bon Appetit, and The New York Times.  Though closed in 1998, the inn lives on in the Dairy Hollow House Soup & Bread Cookbook  (1992), which has sold nearly 280,000 copies.

Writing, gardening, cooking, teaching, and public speaking have intertwined throughout Crescent's life. Called “an earthy, yarn-spinning woman,” by the Chicago Tribune, her storytelling makes her culinary writing both cookbook and memoir. For example, Her 2003 James Beard Award-winning cookbook, Passionate Vegetarian, dedicated to Ned, includes a tribute to him as told through their life together in food.

Her most recent cookbook, The Cornbread Gospels , was named one of the ten best cookbooks published in 2007 by ABC's Good Morning America. Crescent currently is working on The Bean Book, a completely rewritten update of a book by the same title first published in 1972, as well as two non-culinary titles.

Crescent left her native New York at 17 to live a more self-sufficient life in the Ozarks. At 50, she returned to the Vermont farmhouse where she spent summers as a child. There, she lives, writes and gardens. Her next-door neighbors are a  maple-sugarer and a moose. She blogs at nothing is wasted on the writer.