Jill Hunting

Jill Hunting was born and raised in the Midwest and spent her childhood summers in Connecticut. She attended Wheaton College in Massachusetts, where she majored in American Studies. She earned a master's degree from San Francisco Theological Seminary and wrote her thesis on contemporary prophets, centering on the artist Nancy Chinn.She has published widely about food and wine. She is the editor of John McReynolds's STONE EDGE FARM COOKBOOK, which in 2014 was named Book of the Year and Best First Cookbook/The Julia Child Award by the International Association of Culinary Professionals.Jill's first book, FINDING PETE, is the true story of her search to learn what happened to her brother, the first American civilian aid worker to be killed in the War in Vietnam. Jill, the youngest of three sisters, was haunted by Walter Cronkite's report that friends had led Pete to his death. She solved the mystery after 64 letters-- which her mother said were lost in a basement flood--surfaced in 2004, ushering in a series of remarkable discoveries. Jill's research for the book took her to Vietnam and the very site where her brother was slain. Florentine Films (Ken Burns, et al.) will feature Pete's story in an episode of the VIETNAM series airing on PBS in 2017.Jill is currently working on a book about her great-grandfather's discovery of a dinosaur as a student member of the 1872 Yale College Scientific Expedition. Jill and her daughter, the climate advocate May Boeve, visited the site 140 years later. "I am fascinated by unlikely intersections," Jill says. "The chance of an animal becoming a fossil, and of a fossil surviving for many millions of years, and of a 20-year-old from New Haven finding a nearly perfect skeleton of Hesperornis regalis--all of that is unlikely. That my daughter and I were able to intersect with our ancestor by tracking him to a beautiful little canyon in Kansas--that's unlikely, too."