Women in Caribbean Aquaculture Leadership Summit 2025: Breaking Barriers Building Leaders
Celebrating International Women's Day
International Women’s Day is Saturday, March 8, 2025.
To celebrate International Women’s Day, Fisheries Scientist Juli-Anne Russo, a friend, artist and poet, created a month-long panel of experts for the Women in Caribbean Aquaculture Leadership Summit to celebrate and empower women. I’m honored to speak on the March 13 panel on publishing a sustainable seafood cookbook, a one-hour discussion including Q&A.
But enough about me. There is so much talent for this event! Find out more and register: $20 for all panel discussions. The Summit will be available for three months if you can't attend live. All proceeds go to the administrative costs of managing the Caribbean Aquaculture Network.
Here is some backstory about how and when Juli-Anne and I met.
In 2018, I was in New York at the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) conference shilling my cookbook, Salmon from Market to Plate (2016), editing the second cookbook in my series, and working on a seafood/cooking program for an event at the Seattle Aquarium called Green Fish Blue Oceans. Juli-Anne was attending the conference, working part-time as a fisheries scientist while raising her son.
One rainy afternoon, we stole away for lunch in Midtown to discuss seafood, aquaculture, women, publishing, and food. Juli-Anne and I were a match made in heaven, even though we lived worlds apart, she in New Jersey as a mom and scientist, me in Kentucky as a childfree married woman embarking on a cookbook publishing dream, our shared desire for clean, healthy oceans that supported a sustainable seafood agenda tethered us. I was as excited for her work in aquaculture as she was in my cookbook series about seafood and aquaculture. We connected online as people do after an event and vowed to stay in touch. And we did.
We both believed then and still do that aquaculture and wild fisheries cannot exist without each other. More importantly, women, the backbone of the seafood industry, need and deserve to lead in this $368 billion global industry.
Incidentally, at the IACP conference (and related to my topic for Women in Caribbean Aquaculture), I met Jessie, an Environmental Studies and Sociology Graduate and Digital Publisher of lifeasastrawberry.com. She invited me to headnote her weekend workshop, Plenty Retreat, in New Orleans. My topic was Beyond Blogging: Using Your Influence to Make an Impact With Cookbooks, Podcasts, and Other Mediums. You see, life does indeed come full circle.
I want to say that I finished that five-cookbook series. But in April 2019, the day after my event at the Seattle Aquarium, I received my cancer diagnosis, Stage 4 dedifferentiated liposarcoma. You can read more about that chapter of my life in this essay by the University of Kentucky News, Markey Patient, Culinary Author Enjoying Life ‘One Bite at a Time’. Warning, there are graphic images involved.
Thankfully, today, I’m currently NED (no evidence of disease) and still enjoying life, One Bite at a Time. I’m excited to play a small part in this first-of-its-kind Women in Caribbean Aquaculture Leadership Summit.
Here’s a list of the Summit Speakers and again, registration. Please join us!
Maureen xo
Stay Curious. Stay Safe. Make an Impact.
Thank you for sharing @Kathleen Hobbs ❤️
Thanks Maureen for sharing with such a lovely post. Im so happy that we took the time to steel out of the conference to meet in person especially in my favored city New York when the city was at its best. And while I was writing my Itlay book it was indeed a pleasant surprise that you had written a seafood cookbook. How awesome was that?