Building a Career on Travel, Dining and Quest for Pie
Saturday, June 12, 2021
3:45pm - 4:45pm (Central)

Kat Robinson

A successful travel and food writer shares tales from the road, insight on using your journalism skills to move to a new career, and tips for finding the best food in Arkansas.  

Look for her new show Arkansas Dairy Bars: Neat Eats and Cool Treats airing on Arkansas PBS. The companion book will be available on pledge with the show and will be officially out in September under the same title.

About the Presenter:

Kat Robinson is Arkansas's food historian and most enthusiastic road warrior. The Little Rock-based author is the host of the Emmy-nominated documentary Make Room For Pie; A Delicious Slice of The Natural State and the Arkansas PBS show Home Cooking with Kat and Friends. She is a member of the Arkansas Food Hall of Fame committee, a co-chair of the Arkansas Pie Festival, and the Arkansas fellow to the National Food and Beverage Museum.

She has written nine books on food, most notably Arkansas Food: The A to Z of Eating in The Natural State, an alphabetic guide to the dishes, delights and food traditions that define her home state. Her two most recent travel guides, 101 Things to Eat in Arkansas Before You Die and 102 More Things to Eat in Arkansas Before You Die define the state's most iconic and trusted eateries. Robinson's Another Slice of Arkansas Pie: A Guide to the Best Restaurants, Bakeries, Truck Stops and Food Trucks for Delectable Bites in The Natural State outlines more than 400 places to find the dessert, an extraordinary accomplishment that took thousands of miles, hundreds of hours and so many bites to properly document and catalogue.

Her most recent work is A Bite of Arkansas: A Cookbook of Natural State Delights, which offers 140 recipes and stories from her own experiences, presented with the dishes she shares made by and photographed herself. She also recently edited and contributed to 43 Tables: An Internet Community Dines During Quarantine.

Her work has appeared in regional and national publications including Food Network, Forbes Travel Guide, Serious Eats, and AAA Magazines, among others. Her expertise in food research and Arkansas restaurants has been cited by Saveur, Eater, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Outline, and the Southern Foodways Alliance's Gravy podcast, for her skills and talents related to food research and documentation.

Her efforts have been celebrated in articles by Arkansas Good Roads, Arkansas Business and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. She has served as the keynote speaker for the South Arkansas Literary Festival and has spoken before the Arkansas Library Association and at the Six Bridges Literary Festival, Eureka Springs Books in Bloom and the Fayetteville True Lit Festival.

While she writes on food and travel subjects throughout the United States, she is best known for her ever-expanding knowledge of Arkansas food history and restaurant culture, all of which she explores on her 1200+ article website, TieDyeTravels.com. She is also the host of the podcast Kat Robinson's Arkansas.

Robinson's journeys across Arkansas have earned her the title "road warrior," "traveling pie lady," and probably some minor epithets. Few have spent as much time exploring The Natural State, or researching its cuisine. "The Girl in the Hat" has been sighted in every one of Arkansas's 75 counties, oftentimes sliding behind a menu or peeking into a kitchen.

Kat lives with daughter Hunter and partner Grav Weldon in Little Rock.

You can contact the author at [email protected] with questions or correspondence - or, of course, recommendations on great recipes and wonderful places to eat in Arkansas.