Nancy Matsumoto

Nancy Matsumoto is an award-winning freelance writer and editor who writes about agroecology, food sovereignty, food, drink, and Japanese American culture and history.

Her latest book, Reaping What She Sows: How Women Are Rebuilding Our Broken Food System (Melville House Publishing, 2025), tells the stories of women changemakers who are forging shorter, more direct, and more transparent “alternative” food supply chains compared to the long, extractive, and exploitative chains controlled by Big Food and Big Agriculture.

A third-generation Japanese American and holder of three sake certifications, she is the co-author of the James Beard award-winning Exploring the World of Japanese Craft Sake (Tuttle Publishing, 2022). Her book, By the Shore of Lake Michigan (UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press, 2024), a translation of a volume of Japanese tanka poetry published in 1960 by her grandparents Tomiko and Ryokuyō Matsumoto, was awarded an American Book Award in 2025.