Hi! My name is Ben Coleman and I'm a freelance food writer and culture correspondent originally from and currently residing in Portland, Oregon.
My work has appeared on Eater Portland, as well as the Portland Mercury, Portland Monthly, Comics Beat.com, Reactor, and Star Trek.com. I've covered such diverse topics as the vaporwave airport speakeasy, Portland's odd love for David Lynch bars, an all-female bartending competition, the hot dog scene at SDCC, and a Shrek-themed rave on Halloween, and those are just some of my favorites. I've reviewed tons of restaurants, bad movies, indie video games, the occasional opera, as well as every single corn maze in the Portland Metro area. Basically if humanity has invented a form of entertainment, I've wrangled a press pass to get into it.
I'm also the co-writer of The Long Con from Oni Press and Simon & Schuster, a critically acclaimed two volume graphic novel that asked the unexpectedly relevant question "what if the world ended in the middle of a giant pop culture convention?" Read more about it here!
Way back in the day I wrote sketch comedy for Live Wire Radio, won "best writing" at the Portland 48 Hour Film Project, and performed for a couple of local theater companies, including the wildly popular Trek in the Park theatrical adaptation of classic Star Trek TOS episodes, where I played such beloved characters as Helmsman Hadley, the duplicitous Arne Darvin, and who could forget Guard #2. I include this last bit mainly because some people still ask "weren't you a guy in that thing?" and these are usually the things they are thinking of.