Nancy Taylor Robson grew up sailing and building boats with her father on the Chesapeake Bay and was one of the first women in the country to earn her US Coast Guard license to run coastal tugboats. After earning a degree in history, she married and went to work as cook/deckhand alongside her husband, who was captain on an old 85-foot tugboat that ran the Atlantic coast and Gulf of Mexico. During that time, she earned her USCG operator’s license, but finally came (mostly) ashore when she was eight months pregnant with her first child. Her first book, Woman in the Wheelhouse, about those six years, was published by Tidewater Publishers and is now reprinted in paperback.

Robson is also a University of Maryland Master Gardener and grows organic vegetables, fruit, perennials and whatever else she can stuff into the ground on two acres on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, then cooks, cans and freezes what she grows. She uses years of experience to say nothing of always interesting (to her at least) research to write garden articles of all kinds, though are all in some way focused on sustainability and nurturing the environment – or at least doing it no harm.

She is a wife and the mother of two grown children, who no longer care that she used much of their early childhood as material for personal essays she wrote for The Christian Science Monitor and other periodicals. Her daughter, a graduate of the US Merchant Marine Academy, is the second mate on a petroleum tanker in the Pacific; her son is a freelance carpenter, writer and iconoclast. Both have their own stories to tell.

Author of numerous articles and essays, Robson is also the author of two novels: Course of the Waterman (River City Publishing), which won the 2003 Fred Bonnie Award for best first novel, and A Love Like No Other: Abigail and John Adams, a Modern Love Story (Head to Wind Publishing). Her latest book is a collaboration with hospice nurse Sue Collins, RN on the always riveting yet avoided-like-the-plague subject of death, OK Now What? A Caregiver’s Guide to What Matters (Head to Wind Publishing). She is a contributing writer for Chesapeake Bay Magazine, and her work has appeared in Yachting, House Beautiful, The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Post, Workboat, The Christian Science Monitor, Southern Living, Woodenboat, Coastal Living and more.