Avery Yale Kamila is the long-running author of the Vegan Kitchen column in the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram newspaper. In early 2020, she discovered a clue from 1838 which led her to unearth 300 years of buried vegetarian history in Maine.

     In 2024, the Maine Historical Society invited her to co-curate a first-of-its-kind exhibition called Maine's Untold Vegetarian History. Kamila has spoken about this history at vegetarian festivals, for historical societies, and with library audiences. She was retained by The Vegan Museum in Chicago to write about U.S. vegan and vegetarian history for the online exhibition America's Hidden Meals: The History of Vegetarianism in the U.S. She has written about pieces of this culinary history for the Maine Sunday Telegram and the Maine Community Cookbook, Volume 2.

     Kamila is a former staff writer in the features department of the Portland Press Herald. While at the newspaper, she covered food news, society events, and worked as part of an award-winning investigative team that explored a large ground beef recall at a local supermarket. Prior to her time at the Portland Press Herald, she worked as a staff writer for weeklies owned by the Blethen Maine Newspapers group. Before working as a journalist, Kamila worked in community relations for Maine Medical Center and the Institute for Global Ethics. 

     A magna cum laude graduate of the State University of New York, College of Environmental Science and Forestry at Syracuse University with a degree in environmental policy and management, Kamila in 2015 co-founded the grassroots environmental group Portland Protectors, which convinced the Portland City Council to pass the nation’s strongest organic land care ordinance. Since then, Kamila and the group successfully lobbied the Portland City Council to invest $500K in a tree equity program to increase the tree canopy in city neighborhoods that were subject to historic de jure discrimination and now have the least equitable tree canopies. 

   
     Kamila grew up in Litchfield, Maine, at Sunshine Farm, a small, organic farm and one-time vegetarian commune, where in 1988 she became a vegetarian while working as a Burger King cashier. She graduated from Oak Hill High School in Wales, where she wrote for the school's newspaper. In 1991, while a freshman at Syracuse University and a member of Syracuse University for Animal Rights, Kamila read John Robbins' book Diet for a New America and became an instant vegan. Kamila lives with her husband and young son in a 200-year-old downtown Portland home, where the tiny courtyard garden is a certified wildlife habitat providing shelter and food to bumblebees, sweat bees, monarch butterflies, chickadees, cardinals, sparrows, gray squirrels, cottontail rabbits, and many other unseen visitors.