More About Dave

David S. Gibbons grew up in Princeton, N.J., and graduated from the high school there in 1975. His parents were both art historians, and the family spent summers and sabbatical years living in Florence, Italy, and traveling throughout that country and other parts of Europe. Gibbons earned a B.A., summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from Yale in 1979, moved to New York City and spent most of the next four years as a sports writer and editor for The Paterson News and The Hudson Dispatch in northern New Jersey and The Caracas Daily News in Venezuela.

His first entrée into book publishing was as assistant to the book packager Angela Miller. Gibbons went with Miller when her company became the literary division of International Management Group (IMG), the multi-division sports marketing and entertainment agency. He subsequently worked as Senior Editor, Director of Rights and Associate Publisher under Donald I. Fine at Fine’s eponymous company, and later as Director of Subsidiary Rights at Grove/Weidenfeld.

After Grove/Weidenfeld was sold in 1991, Gibbons was made redundant and he began working as a freelance editor and writer. He conducted numerous interviews with prominent neighborhood characters for the “On the Record” feature in the newspaper Chelsea Now and wrote various articles for other local Manhattan publications. His first book collaboration was with Dennis Overstreet, The Wine Merchant of Beverly Hills, on Overstreet’s New Wine Guide.

He subsequently ghost-wrote six cookbooks, including Dinner After Dark by Colin Cowie and Town/Country by Geoffrey Zakarian. He also co-wrote three books about cheese with Max McCalman. The most recent, Mastering Cheese, was named “Best Cheese Book in the World” at 2011 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards in Paris; the second, Cheese: A Connoisseur’s Guide to the World’s Best, won a James Beard Award in 2006. [The three books have combined hardcover sales of more than 150,000 copies.] Gibbons currently writes the cheese column for Wine Spectator magazine and was the most prolific contributor to The Oxford Companion to Cheese.

Gibbons lived in Manhattan for 37 years. He and his wife, Cora Wen, an internationally known yoga instructor, now divide their time between San Francisco and East Hampton, N.Y., where Gibbons is a frequent contributor to The East Hampton Star’s magazine, East. Gibbons has two children, ages 28 and 32, whose weekend soccer, basketball and baseball teams he coached for 12 years. He is proficient in Italian and Spanish and has good knowledge of French. He has traveled extensively throughout Europe, South America and the U.S., and counts among his hobbies skiing, surfing and cycling.