Richárde Under Museum Artwork

Bestselling cookbook author. Model. Experienced print and new media journalist. Sometime television journalist. Guest blogger every now and then. Author and writer. Guest editorial columnist. Host of her own blogtalkradio web show, “Much Ado About Nothing.” Podcaster. University of Texas alumna, class of 2007. Got it all? We probably ought to leave it as everyone else refers to her—a truly talented renaissance woman.

As a young girl in Illinois, teachers told Richárde that Krystle Nicole Russin, her real, lengthy diva name, and love of going by initials “KNR” on homework didn’t fly at school—she had to use one first name until she either became an eccentric rap superstar or American president. They also told her in junior high school none of the state and national political officeholders she wanted to interview for her school newspaper would accept a little kid’s student press requests. They all did.

Once she filled up her school newspaper’s monthly political Q&A series the summer before her ninth grade school year, Russin sought real journalism credits. In those days, editors didn’t Google stalk freelancers who cold called them for work and thought the squeaky voiced 14-year old political writer on the phone was probably an adult journalist with a helium issue. They eventually learned her real age—only after she impressed them with her work ethic interviewing Illinois legislators like her news idols Tim Russert and ABC anchors Peter Jennings and Aaron Brown. From 15 to 16, she hosted local PBS show Illinois Stories, syndicated in Illinois, Missouri and Iowa. Luckily, the content was decent enough to overshadow the awful flute theme song and log cabin graphics. The high school student forced her Meet the Press wannabe nail in the coffin when the morning of her 16th birthday, then-presidential candidate John Kerry faxed her his over ten-page interview responses, allowed her to tag along on his campaign’s Illinois stop the following March, and she chatted with a Bush-Cheney campaign director. As a regularly working journalist to this day, Russin has written about business, politics, beauty, sports, opinion, and with a few exceptions—volunteer gigs for monetarily challenged places like PBS—her byline appears under “any assignments I get paid to write.” She is from Illinois after all.

More than beautiful, Russin is a nerd. She graduated high school at 16, community college at 17 and the University of Texas at Austin at 19. Somewhere between angrily throwing neon, patterned, holiday socks in her suitcase this morning and lamenting the importance of white onion restraint in her cookbook soup recipes, she argues she would have finished college at 18 had it not been for annoying classes per major enrollment rules.

At the end of her academic career, she participated in the Miss Texas pageant during heavy mold season despite feeling terribly allergic, sneezy, naseous, and bloated from allergy medications for “the same reason high school guys ask girls out to the prom: to put another notch in my belt.” She lived to tell about it in a hugely popular Huffington Post guest blog, among the site’s most read pieces of May 2009 and the Top 5 read pieces of its day.

When she searched for journalism opportunities in New York City at 21, friends encouraged Russin to approach modeling agencies and seek representation. She now mostly models “beauty,” the hair/makeup category, but wants to expand. She hopes she can someday model couture lines like Chanel, a line she loves in her regular life, Marc Jacobs, and Versace, for starters. The contact form link lies up top—we’re talking to you, Karl Lagerfield.

In her spare time, Russin records songs. Lots of songs; many that go unreleased. Songs in every genre under the sun. An opera lover, Russin likes performing each genre differently down to pronunciation “because every musical style should have its own performance method and be felt like an opera performance.” She sings out, talk sings, gets whispery, shouts, performs overdramatically, and sings emotionlessly.  (She does know how to sound traditionally good when necessary also.) Russin taught herself how to compose sheet music while bored in some seventh grade class she can’t remember, forced herself to learn music production on her home computers, and used fellow students as recording test subjects as she discovered her inner Max Martin. In June 2010, she released an art pop double album called Sex Appeal, Love, Confessions Parts 1 & 2 with its additional material album My Other Half, put out a few corresponding psychadelic 60′s/70‘s singles, got together with Russian tennis star and California transplant homegrown DJ Dmitry Tursunov for a Studio 54 meets modern disco sound on The Dmitry Tursunov Experience EP, and will soon release a 1980′s style follow-up album.

Her first cookbook, published in December 2010, The Non-Diet Real Cookbook: Easy Recipes to Stay Skinny Eating Anything You Want and Learn How to Cook!, was based on a mixture of recipes from abroad, healthy food, and the Midwest’s classic roots: soul food, German cooking, and Irish cusine blended together. Seeing her success paying off with #1 beside her book on Amazon—the old adage of doing what you love showing through in quality work—like it or not, she is now hooked on writing cookbooks until the end of time…and has a few under her belt already.

Russin—who also has an erratically scheduled, solo podcast, “Piece of Work,” she updates when in the ranting mood—recently began hosting the web radio show “Much Ado About Nothing” during March 2011. She has other cool goals like creating a makeup line, writing cookbooks up to the ceiling, hosting a cooking show, writing and directing indie cinema, creating her own line of food and other culinary products, getting involved with TV journalism again either in front of or behind the camera, one day singing in a movie or two or three, blogging more often, designing denim miniskirts, and beyond. She will accomplish all that in time. For the time being, she likely wants to talk about her latest street food find, do super dumb stuff believing she is hysterically funny—see photo at left where she imitates saltwater fish in the tank behind her, Tweet silly photos, or post pictures of her goofy toy dogs on her public Facebook page.