I'm a publication designer, writer, cookbook author, and the founder of America’s favorite rural bakery. See my cookbook’s Publishers Weekly starred review here.
Here you’ll find my publication design work over three decades, along with the story of the rural Virginia bakery I started from scratch (and, combining the two careers, my two Clarkson Potter/ Penguin Random House cookbooks I authored). I’ll continue to design and write for publications; if you're here for those reasons, take a look at my portfolios and send me a note.
While the art director of the Washington Post, Smithsonian, and Preservation magazines during the week, I baked pies and breads on weekends in my Virginia Piedmont farmhouse and sold them out of an old red truck that I bought from designer Tommy Hilfiger. When a New York Times story sent 57,000 people to my fledgling bakery website after just two dozen hits the day before, I left publishing to launch the Red Truck Bakery on the edge of the Shenandoah Valley in rural Virginia. The bakery has received accolades from Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama, and many national publications, and ships thousands of items nationwide each year. The story I wrote for the 2024 Virginia Travel Guide about launching a beloved rural bakery with a national following is below.
I’m an advisor to the Jacques Pépin Foundation, and am a member of the Southern Foodways Alliance and the James Beard Foundation. I am the author of the Red Truck Bakery Cookbook (Clarkson Potter, 2018) and The Red Truck Bakery Farmhouse Cookbook (Clarkson Potter, 2022). I’ve written for the Washington Post, Smithsonian, Preservation, Taste of the South, The Local Palate, Huffington Post, and Garden & Gun, and am at work on a third book. After 15 years, I sold the bakery in December, 2023; the Northern Virginia magazine story is here.
Falls Church Presbyterian, 225 East Broad Street, Falls Church, Virginia, 703-532-6518
Second annual Crooked Steeple Literary Festival’s April 2024 event features author Brian Noyes, founder of the Red Truck Bakery. Brian will ...
Falls Church Presbyterian, 225 East Broad Street, Falls Church, Virginia, 703-532-6518
Full details to come shortly. Red Truck Bakery founder Brian Noyes will speak about pivoting from a 30-year publishing career to his launch ...
During a Washington, D.C., career spanning thirty years, I was the art director of the Washington Post, Smithsonian, Preservation, Architecture, and Condé Nast's House & Garden magazines. I’ve designed magazines, books, and exhibition catalogs for The White House, The World Bank, National Geographic Books, Princeton Architectural Press, John Wiley & Sons, The Washington Post, The American Institute of Architects, Blair Publishers, North Carolina Pottery Center, and North Carolina State University’s Gregg Museum of Art + Design. I’ll continue to design publications.
View my design portfolios:
For more information or to say hey, send me an email.
My first book, Red Truck Bakery Cookbook (Clarkson Potter, 2018) is in its seventh printing. The new Red Truck Bakery Farmhouse Cookbook (Clarkson Potter, 2022) is in its second printing and highlights savory and sweet recipes with farmer's market ingredients, with dishes from the bakery archives, my training at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, L’Academie de Cuisine near D.C., King Arthur Baking in Vermont, a former convent in Oaxaca, Mexico, and through the teachings of my Southern grandmother in the mountains of North Carolina. See our Publishers Weekly starred review here.
To ship a signed and personalized cookbook anywhere in the U.S., order here.
View my BAKERY PORTFOLIO here.
Carey Winfrey, my former editor-in-chief at Smithsonian magazine, asked me to design his new book, Key West Sketches (Blair, September 19, 2023). Long America's most vibrant writers’ colony, Key West traces its writerly roots to Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Hersey, Richard Wilbur, James Merrill, and Elizabeth Bishop. More recently, Thomas McGuane, Judy Blume, Ann Beattie, Philip Caputo, Alison Lurie, and Meg Cabot have added their luster to the island’s literary heritage. This collection includes a treasure trove of more than sixty essays from the town’s best-known writers: those mentioned above and Lee Smith, Frank Deford, Phyllis Rose, Glenn Frankel, Joy Williams, Barbara Ehrenreich, Billy Collins, and many more. Available at your favorite bookstore and the usual online places.
A nearby town’s vague request for Mrs. Beavers’ long-lost caramel cake recipe, combined with fashion designer Billy Reid’s yearning to recreate a family heirloom, became my baking project and the cover story I wrote for Garden & Gun’s food issue. The story is here.
On a small staff with a minuscule budget, I was the art director in a leaky National Trust for Historic Preservation basement designing Preservation magazine. Twenty-five years ago, in a grand ballroom in the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, we won the big prize: the National Magazine Award for General Excellence.
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