Nancy Rommelmann

Nancy Rommelmann's articles and profiles have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the LA Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, Reason, and other publications. Her work often explores the story behind the story: LAPD officers and the refuge that is the cop bar; the inhabitants of a Skid Row dive; the disciples of a Vietnamese spiritual leader; the workaday lives of a Mexican gardening crew in the Hollywood Hills, and a cross-country trip with one of John Wayne Gacy’s pen pals, to interview the serial killer two weeks before his execution. Recently, Rommelmann has taken to chronicling people whose outsize dreams and delusions inspire them to audacious and sometimes terrible acts: a mother with Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy who murdered her fourteen-year-old daughter before herself committing suicide (“Sacrificing Rebecca”); the writer Laura Albert, who perpetrated a ten-year con by writing as a teenage boy, the demimonde darling JT LeRoy (“No Exit Plan”), and Amanda Jo Stott-Smith, who in May 2009 forced her two young children off a bridge in Portland, Oregon.

Rommelmann's Op-Ed pieces and book reviews appear in the Oregonian newspaper. She is also a contributor to the media website LA Observed.

Rommelmann’s work has received numerous awards, including Best Arts Feature 2008 for “No Exit Plan,” from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN), as well as Best Entertainment Arts Feature 2008 from the Los Angeles Press Club. “Jena at 15,” an LA Weekly feature about the actress Jena Malone’s bid for emancipation from her mother, received the identical awards in 2001.

Rommelmann’s food writing appears in Bon Appetit magazine. She has worked as a restaurant reviewer for the LA Weekly and Willamette Week, and as a food columnist for many publications and websites, including Portland Monthly, MIX (the food magazine of the Oregonian) and Pajamas Media. In 2002, she shared an AAN award, for food coverage, with Pulitzer Prize-winning food writer Jonathan Gold. In 2009, she became a charter contributor to Zester Daily, a site dedicated to the culture of food and wine.

Rommelmann has published three books, including The Real Real World (with Hillary Johnson), which spent fourteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and Everything You Pretend to Know about Food. She is currently at work on the nonfiction book, On the Bridge, a Meditation on Murder and the Case of Amanda Jo Stott-Smith.