Like a lot of us, Lyndsay C. Green started gardening during the COVID-19 pandemic.

More than a passing hobby to fill idle hours stuck at home, though, for her it was a hands-on way to dive deeper into the topic she’d just been hired to write about: food.

But all that weeding and watering quickly became something deeper, something that would shape her work, her future plans, and even her faith. “It felt like a spiritual thing, like this is what I’m supposed to be doing,” she says of growing her own food for the first time. “I started thinking about food sovereignty.”

Specifically, food sovereignty in Detroit, the resurgent American city where her husband, Marcus, was raised and where both of their careers have taken sharp, skyrocketing turns since they moved there in 2017. It is a city striving to square its abundant opportunities with its complicated history—which is exactly how the Penn State couple sees it.

“I feel like I was called to this city,” says Lyndsay ’10 Com, ’10 Lib, who was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2023 for her coverage of Detroit’s food scene in the Detroit Free Press. “There is something special here for me.”

Marcus ’10 Com, who’s earned accolades of his own as a broadcast journalist and, more recently, a football coach, takes a broader view: “The Detroit Lyndsay knows is a lot different than the one I grew up in.”

Lyndsay Luff and Marcus Green met during their senior year at University Park, six hours east of Detroit and five hours west of Lyndsay’s hometown—Mount Vernon, N.Y., a suburb of New York City just north of the Bronx. Lyndsay had spent her first year and a half at Penn State Altoona, while Marcus, a four-year varsity lineman at University Liggett high school in a Detroit suburb, joined the Penn State football team with NFL dreams. But a routine physical before his freshman season uncovered a benign brain tumor the size of a dime that ended his playing career before he ever set foot on the field.

“It was a devastating time in my life,” he says, “extremely frustrating.” As he started on medication to shrink the tumor, he leaned on his teammates, his position coach, Larry Johnson, and his faith to get him through the disappointment. The broadcast journalism major pivoted to playing competitive club basketball and chartering the Eta Alpha Chapter of Iota Phi Theta fraternity. By his senior year, he had won the Mr. Black Penn State pageant and met his future bride.

“She just stood out in every way,” says Marcus, who was introduced to Lyndsay through mutual friends. “I didn’t get her number—I had her take mine, trying to be cool. Then I spent the next month hoping she’d text or call.”

Eventually she did, and the two struck up an easy friendship. Lyndsay was double-majoring in journalism and international studies, hoping to meld her love of magazines, beauty, and travel into a dream job that, she admits, was more dream than job: “I wanted to be the beauty director of a travel magazine. And that position just doesn’t exist.”

After college, she moved to New York and wrote in the beauty space for powerhouse brands such as Ebony, Glamour, People StyleWatch, and Teen Vogue, while Marcus started his career as a production assistant on ESPN’s Outside the Lines and then ABC’s World News Tonight. Their 2014 Michigan wedding and NYC reception were chronicled on Glamour’s website, and the following year they moved to Chicago, where Lyndsay launched a digital magazine, Beauty Atlas, essentially creating that perfect position—“beauty director of a travel magazine”—she had envisioned for herself.

Beauty Atlas won Launch of the Year (New Title) in the Digital Magazine Awards in London in 2016, a bright spot in a tough time for the couple. In 2017, Marcus was laid off from his job at a digital sports network, and Lyndsay’s mother suffered a serious complication after emergency surgery that left her permanently in a vegetative state.

“My mom was 57 [when it happened]. We were close,” says Lyndsay, an only child. “Leading up to when she got sick, we were getting even closer, having an adult relationship.”

That summer, the Greens relocated to Detroit, and Lyndsay took monthly trips to New York to visit her mom in a long-term care facility. Back in Marcus’ hometown, the couple leaned on his parents for support, and they got reacquainted with the city in transition—a city that would soon spark transitions for them, too.

Aside from being the birthplace of Motown, Detroit was long known as the automobile capital of the world, the place where Henry Ford built his first car and the assembly line revolutionized manufacturing. But auto industry changes and racial tensions in the latter half of the 20th century drove an exodus from the Motor City. From 1950 to 2010, Detroit’s population plummeted by 61%, and violent crime steadily rose.

“I left at 17 and came back at 34,” says Marcus. “While I was gone, Detroit went bankrupt, the mayor was [put] in prison. Neighborhoods are emptier, there are dilapidated properties. So many people just left.”

But in the scores of empty houses and vacant lots left behind, some saw a new kind of potential. Gardens popped up on unused land, and nonprofits and city-led initiatives furthered the burgeoning movement, giving out free seeds and sharing resources with residents. In 2013, Detroit passed its first Urban Agriculture Ordinance, which legalized urban farms, gardens, greenhouses, and related endeavors, as well as the selling of homegrown produce on private properties.

When the Greens moved to town, Lyndsay focused less on the urban blight and more on the patches of green in between. Back in her beauty beat days in New York, she had attended an Origins skincare brand event at a rooftop garden in Brooklyn and had marveled at the rows of fresh produce growing high above the city as part of the brand’s “farm to product” concept. “I was like, This is the dream. I’ve always wanted to be in the city but feel like I’m on a farm,” she says. “My dream has always been, When I make enough money, I’m going to have a beautiful brownstone with a farm in my backyard. I just thought I could have it all. And here, you can.”

When she was named the dining editor at the monthly Hour Detroit magazine in January 2020, Lyndsay gained a new kind of access to the local food scene. But just a few months into the job, the world shut down amid a pandemic, and suddenly there were no eatery openings and food festivals to cover. Instead, the journalist with a decade of experience under her belt got to know chefs and restaurateurs at their most vulnerable. They talked about their lives, their struggles, and how difficult the business is. She became privy to the cracks and flaws in the industry, and to our reliance on food systems in general. All of it would inform her perspective once establishments began flipping their signs back to “OPEN.”

Then, in November 2021, she was hired by the Detroit Free Press to be the daily newspaper’s dining and restaurant critic. In the role, she would also head up the paper’s longstanding Restaurant of the Year and Top 10 Best New Restaurants projects. It was a fair amount of power being given to a relative newcomer. But moving from beauty to food didn’t feel like that big of a writing shift to Lyndsay: Both beats focus on ingredients and sourcing, both keep tabs on industry trends, and both include a fair amount of vivid descriptions and sensory experiences.

As a native New Yorker, her palate and preferences had been refined by all kinds of cuisine, and she was open to trying anything in service to her readers. But she also deeply researches ingredients, flavors, and cooking methods before she writes about them. “There’s a lot more than just sitting down to assess what I ate.” 
 

Marcus used the severance pay from his last job in Chicago to purchase camera equipment and launched the Determined Series, a video series he filmed, edited, and produced highlighting up-and-coming Detroit athletes, community leaders, teachers, and activists. The broadcast journalist chose the subjects for their determination—to overcome, to succeed, to give back—a trait he felt embodies the spirit of their city, and one he says he personally strives for: “Taking advantage of whatever opportunity you’re presented with and trying to do the best you can.”

As the Determined Series gained traction, and multiple first-place awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, Marcus began volunteering as an assistant football coach at the high school level. For a while he juggled part-time coaching and freelancing, but he soon realized that seeing his players for only an hour or two in practice wasn’t enough to fully understand their academic challenges and personal struggles.

“I saw a greater need than, ‘This is how you do a three-point stance,’” he says of what he could contribute to the young men’s lives. “I knew there would be a greater value to me being there during the day.”

In 2022, he was approached by a friend about northwest Detroit’s Lincoln-King High School, a public charter school that had never had a football program. Would Marcus, the former player whose own football dreams had been dashed, consider being a brand-new team’s founding leader? “I had never coached kids that have never played football before,” he says. “The entire team had never played high school football before, from seniors down to freshmen.”

A determined Marcus said yes to the challenge, becoming the school’s full-time athletic director and first football coach. He started cobbling together a team that May with his sights set on the season opener in August. “I won’t even say we had minimal resources, because that’s saying too much,” he says. The players didn’t have helmets until the first week in August. They didn’t have a home field. They didn’t have a team logo or nickname. They wore white jerseys all season; for them, every game was an “away” game.

That season, the Lincoln-King High School football team went winless, posting an 0-9 record. “We had to find the victories outside the scoreboard,” Marcus says. At the end of the season, he used his coach’s paycheck to buy the program’s participants—every player and coach who’d stuck it out to the very end—commemorative rings, to signify that they had laid a foundation for something bigger than themselves.

“[Buying those rings] just embodied who he is,” Lyndsay says. “It showed that he’s somebody who’s really thoughtful, and that coaching means a lot to him and the kids mean a lot to him, too. I felt a lot of gratitude that that’s the person I get to be with.”
 

While Marcus was building a new career using an old skill set, Lyndsay was making waves in her first year at the Free Press. She reoriented the 2022 Top 10 Best New Restaurants list to highlight eateries that were all building businesses with humanitarian or environmental efforts, naming sustainable sushi bar Sozai as Restaurant of the Year. In addition to pieces one would expect from a dining critic—10 great lunch spots in metro Detroit; where to eat near the annual Auto Show—she covered more unconventional topics: Restaurant workers finding jobs in other industries postpandemic. The lack of diversity among diners in metro Detroit, a city whose population is nearly 80% Black.

As she rounded her first anniversary at the paper, Lyndsay wrote an essay titled “Accidentally Anonymous,” about her experience of going repeatedly unrecognized around town, particularly among restaurant owners, chefs, and others whom she’d met before and even interviewed face to face. “I am the Detroit Free Press’s first Black restaurant critic, and it appears, one of few, if not the only Black restaurant critic at a major newspaper in the country,” she wrote. “What does not being noticed say when you’re a Black woman—a majority in the city you report on, but a minority in Detroit’s fine dining spaces?”

In the spring of 2023, she learned that “Accidentally Anonymous” was picked to be published in that year’s edition of The Best American Food Writing anthology. A month after that, Lyndsay was named a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, American journalism’s highest honor, in the Criticism category. “It still hits me, just how huge it was [to be nominated for a Pulitzer],” she says. “I’m only the fourth food critic in 50 years to be nominated in the Criticism category.”

To make matters more exciting, the announcement came the same day the Greens’ offer was accepted on their first house, a 3,600-square-foot abandoned home on Detroit’s north end that was built in 1901. It needed a lot of work, but Marcus’ father promised to help with renovations, and the couple got the seller to include the empty lot next door in the sale. Many empty side lots in the city are available through the Detroit Land Bank Authority’s Side Lot program, which sells vacant lots adjacent to homeowners’ property for as little as $100, provided the lot meets certain requirements. 

The Greens’ purchase brought Lyndsay one step closer to her urban farm dream. Less than a month later, she won the James Beard Journalism Award for Emerging Voice. The James Beard Foundation’s awards are among the most respected and widely recognized in global food media. In her acceptance speech at the awards ceremony, Lyndsay talked about how this beat, in this city, had felt like a homecoming in more than one way. “[I’m] just so happy to be in the city of Detroit.”
 

For their second season, Marcus rented time at Little League fields and other high schools’ fields so his team could experience some semblance of a “home” game. Their first was the 2023 season opener, in which the Lincoln-King football team notched its first-ever win: 28-6. “The other team actually quit in the third quarter,” Marcus says. Their second game was a devastating triple-OT loss, but the team managed a couple of more wins that fall, finishing the season 3-6. All three wins came at borrowed “home” fields.

Off the field, Marcus used his college connections to invest in his students’ futures via trips to college campuses. “I’m able to be a living example of where they want to go, what they want to be,” he says. And he used his graphic design background to create logos for every school in the district. “We’re the Lincoln-King Eagles now,” he says proudly. 

Energized by his new career path, the budding coach applied for a spot in the National Coalition of Minority Football Coaches’ (NCMFC) UFL Fellowship, a new program sponsored by the NCMFC, the United Football League, and athletic brand Under Armour that would be giving a select few minority high school football coaches time and experience on a pro team’s sideline. “Every opportunity I see, I run it by Lyndsay first, get her thoughts, and then I go after it,” he says.

Marcus was among eight high school coaches across the country to score a fellowship slot during the pro league’s spring 2024 season. Assigned to the Michigan Panthers, he attended the team’s training camp, connected with its pro players and coaches, and learned from veterans of the sport, including head coach Mike Nolan, a former NFL coach.

“Mike Nolan is a relational coach—he builds solid relationships with players in a short amount of time,” says Marcus, who followed Nolan’s lead. “I went to every chapel they had before games. Every pregame meal, every pregame team meeting, understanding the coach’s perspective of ‘owning the rooms.’”

The whirlwind UFL season wrapped in early June, with Nolan named UFL Coach of the Year. Marcus returned to Lincoln-King and poured everything he’d learned into his young players. The team responded that fall with a perfect 9-0 record, outscoring their opponents 357-37 in regular season play.

A heartbreaking 26-24 loss in the district semifinal couldn’t shake their pride, as the team boasted one All-State nominee, two All-Region selections, and 21 All-Conference players. After just three years at the helm of a ship he’d built himself, Marcus was named the MHSFCA 2024 Coach of the Year for Division 5, Region 4.

Similar to a player being named to an All-Star team, Lyndsay feels a burst of pride when a local restaurant or chef she’s highlighted earns national recognition. Sozai, the sushi bar she had crowned Restaurant of the Year in 2022, was named to Bon Appétit’s Best New Restaurants list later that year, and its chef, Hajime Soto, was crowned Best Chef: Great Lakes by the James Beard Foundation in 2024. Similarly, Korean restaurant Noori Pocha, which Lyndsay named to her Top 10 list in early 2024, was honored as one of The New York Times’ “50 Favorite Restaurants in America” later that year.

“It’s really cool to see places like that get recognition, and to know we played a small part in that,” she says.

Nominated for another Beard Award in 2024, Lyndsay spent much of the year hosting Top 10 Takeover events at her chosen establishments, and working on a long-range feature series about food sovereignty. “I think we’ve gotten so distracted from what’s real. I feel like we are a people who are reliant on food systems. We’ve been stripped from the fact that we can actually do it ourselves,” she says. “You can grow your own food, and you can nourish yourself. And I feel like that’s a message I’ve been told to share.”

She interviewed dozens of sources about Detroit’s urban agriculture efforts and the occasional backlash to them, backlash that Lyndsay says is coming, at least in part, from the residual trauma of Black Americans’ history. “Detroit is so full of Great Migration–era people, whether they themselves are or if their aunts, uncles, parents, grandparents came from that trajectory,” she says. “The sentiment I hear is, ‘I didn’t come to Detroit to live on a farm, or to be next door to a farm.’”

Lyndsay, by contrast, did come to Detroit with hopes to live on a farm. She didn’t plant a garden last summer at the house owned by her in-laws where she and Marcus have been living since they moved to the city, because she was hoping she’d be able to till the soil in her own backyard. But renovations on the century-old house have been much slower than anticipated, and the Greens had to shift their priorities for another big life moment: their first child, a son, born on Nov. 28, 2024.

Yes, the food writer gave birth on Thanksgiving Day.

That same day, the food sovereignty feature she’d worked on for many months was published in the Free Press. Awash in new-baby bliss and exhaustion, Lyndsay missed any chatter it received, which she admits was likely not much for a reason wholly unrelated to urban agriculture: “The Lions play here in Detroit on Thanksgiving. Everything gets overshadowed.”

But she got her due six months later, when her name was called at the 2025 James Beard Journalism Awards ceremony, and she took home yet another top prize: this time in the “Foodways” category. “I was shocked,” she says, calling it “gratifying” to be recognized nationally for a two-part series that had stayed largely under the radar back home. She accepted the award at a ceremony in Chicago, this time without her husband in the audience: Marcus was with the Michigan Panthers, who were competing in the UFL championship game on the same day, finishing up his two-year fellowship.

“I celebrate her always,” he says, sad to have missed her acceptance speech. “She’s so talented at so many things.”

Besides successfully juggling motherhood and her career, the next thing Lyndsay hopes to be talented at is homesteading. She visualizes rows of fresh produce on their barren side lot. She sees chickens pecking happily in their backyard, maybe a beehive and an array of wildflowers, all within a few steps from her door and a few minutes’ drive from her favorite yoga studio, coffee shop, and her next downtown assignment. She sees herself writing a book on food sovereignty, and hosting farm-to-table dinners with other urban agriculture aficionados. “I think I want to focus on empowering people of color to return to the land,” she says, “and see the value of eating from local farmers and growing their own food.”

Marcus, now several months into a new job at a boarding school in the suburbs of Detroit, believes his wife can do whatever she sets her mind to—just like him.