Multi-award-winning author, journalist, cooking teacher, and TV host, Steven Raichlen is the man who reinvented barbecue. His best-selling Barbecue Bible cookbook series (4 million copies in print) and The Primal Grill and Barbecue University™ TV shows on PBS have helped people all over the world ascend the ladder of grilling enlightenment.

Raichlen’s obsession with live fire cooking began with The Barbecue Bible (Workman, 1998), an IACP/Julia Child Award-winning encyclopedic study of global grilling chronicling his 4-year, 200,000-mile odyssey on the world’s barbecue trail. In 2000, Workman published How to Grill, the world’s first step-by-step guide to live fire cooking, with more than 1000 color photographs, hailed by the New York Times as “astute, approachable, and eminently appealing." How to Grill won an IACP Award and has more than 1.5 million copies in print.

BBQ USA (2003) is Raichlen’s 780-page, 650-photograph, 425-recipe love song to regional American barbecue and won a 2004 James Beard Award. His most recent book, Raichlen on Ribs (Workman, 2006), celebrates what for many people is the most iconic and quintessential barbecue—ribs—in all their global glory.

Raichlen’s 28 books include Barbecue Bible Sauces, Rubs, and Marinades; Beer Can Chicken; the perennially popular Miami Spice (Workman Publishing), and the James Beard Award-winning Healthy Latin Cooking published in English and Spanish by Rodale. In all Raichlen has won 5 James Beard Awards and 3 IACP awards, and his books have been translated into 12 languages, including French, Russian, and Japanese.

Raichlen’s TV shows include the popular Barbecue University™ and the sizzling new Primal Grill, which debuts on PBS in May, 2008. He has appeared on virtually every major national TV show, from The Today Show, Good Morning American, and CNN to Oprah, the View, and Regis and Kelly. In 2000, Raichlen created Barbecue University, a unique cooking school hailed by the Food Network as the "#1 Barbecue Experience in the U.S." The 2008 sessions will take place at the ultra-luxurious Broadmoor resort in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on June 1-4, and 4-7. Raichlen also created the Best of Barbecue line of grilling accessories, manufactured by the Companion Group.

In August, 2003, Raichlen battled—and defeated—Iron Chef Roksbura Michiba in a barbecue battle on Japanese television. He is currently working on two books: one is a novel—and, no, it has nothing to do with barbecue. The other is Planet Barbecue, which is scheduled for publication next year. In 1975, Raichlen received a Watson Foundation Fellowship to study medieval cooking in Europe, as well as a Fulbright to study comparative literature. He holds a degree in French literature from Reed College and trained at the Cordon Bleu and La Varenne cooking schools in Paris. Raichlen lives with his wife, Barbara, in Miami, Florida.