Kate Livie explores the diverse story of the Bay’s staple seafood, blue crabs. Crabs reveal the complex, deeply nuanced connection between the Bay’s environment and the Chesapeake people and how that relationship has transformed due to industry, adaptation, pollution and climate change. She also explores the foodways and history of the beautiful swimmer— a story of diversity, from enslaved cooks who created our Chesapeake cuisine flavored by the tastes of the diaspora, to modern-day packing houses powered by H2B migrant pickers from Mexico.
Kate Livie is a professional Chesapeake educator, writer and historian. An Eastern Shore native, Kate is passionate about the Chesapeake Bay’s culture and landscape. She has written extensively about regional travel, history, environment and foodways for publications from Wooden Boat to Baltimore Magazine to Edible Delmarva. Her 2015 book, Chesapeake Oysters: The Bay’s Foundation and Future, won the Maryland Historical Society’s Marion Brewington Prize for Maritime History. Formerly the director of education and associate curator at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, she is currently a part of the humanities faculty at the Center for Environment and Society at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, where she teaches courses about the Bay’s environment, arts, economy, traditions and culture. Kate lives with her husband in her hometown of Chestertown, Maryland, on Morgan Creek.
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