Cheryl Tan

Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan is a New York-based food and fashion writer who is researching and writing a food memoir about discovering her Singaporean family by learning to cook with them. "A Tiger In The Kitchen" is scheduled to be published by Hyperion's Voice imprint in February 2011.

In early 2010, she was artist in residence at the Yaddo artists' colony, where she completed her memoir.

She has covered fashion, retail and home design (and written the occasional food story) for the Wall Street Journal. Before that she was the senior fashion writer for In Style magazine and senior arts, entertainment and fashion writer for the Baltimore Sun. Her stories have also appeared in Marie Claire, Every Day With Rachael Ray, Family Circle, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, The (Portland) Oregonian, The (Topeka) Capital-Journal, The (Singapore) Straits Times and Elle.com. She is also a regular contributor to The Atlantic Food Channel.

Born and raised in Singapore, she crossed the ocean to go to Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., after realizing that a) she wanted to be a journalist and b) if she was going to be as mouthy in her work as she was in real life, she'd better not do it in Singapore. Unsure of whether she would remain in the U.S. after college, she interned in places as disparate as possible. This led her to hanging out with Harley Davidson enthusiasts in Topeka, Kan., interviewing gypsies in about their burial rituals in Portland, Ore., covering July 4 in Washington, D.C., and chronicling the life and times of the Boomerang Pleasure Club, a group of Italian-American men that had been getting together to cook, play cards and gab about women for decades in their storefront "clubhouse" in Chicago.

She started her full-time journalism career helping out on the cops beat in Baltimore -- training that would prove to be essential in her future fashion reporting. Both, it turns out, are like war zones. The only difference is, people dress differently.