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Travel writer Barbara Gibbs Ostmann to give banquet keynote address. |
February 5, 2010 --Travel writer Barbara Gibbs Ostmann will give the banquet address at MAP's 6th annual Publishing Summit on Thursday evening, April 8, prior to the presentation of the Ranly Awards.
Ostmann will entertain listeners with "True Confessions from a Travel, Food and Wine Writer." When Ostmann graduated from MU J-School, she dreamed of being a foreign correspondent. In a totally unplanned and unforeseen way, she did exactly that, reporting not about wars and politics but about food, wine and travel from all around the globe for three decades and counting.
Ostmann's career has led her from "Fried Pies to Witchetty Grubs," as the title of her talk implies. Born and reared in the Arkansas Ozarks (where she enjoyed her grandmother's down-home fried pies), Ostmann started traveling as a junior in high school and hasn't stopped yet. She has witnessed cremation ceremonies in Bali, tasted horse testicles in Italy, hiked the Milford Track in New Zealand, sampled fried scorpions and bamboo rat in China, skied the Alps, eaten her way around Sicily and Sardinia, canoed the Amazon, kayaked the Colorado, ridden a mule to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, fox-trotted through the Missouri Ozarks, climbed Kilimanjaro, rappelled a waterfall in Argentina, gone hot-air ballooning over the Masai Mara in Kenya, and savored witchetty grub stew in the Australian Outback, to name just a few of her adventures.
Ostmann is co-author of the award-winning "The Recipe Writer's Handbook" (Wiley) and the "Food Writers' Favorites" cookbook series (more than five million books in print). She was food editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, food writer for the New York Times Regional Newspaper Group, and writes regularly for newspapers, magazines, newsletters and the Internet. She was an assistant professor and the coordinator of the Agricultural Journalism program at MU and has taught News 105 at the J-School as an adjunct.
She and her veterinarian husband, Wil, live on a small farm in Franklin County, Missouri, along with one cat and six dogs.
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