Write. Edit. Manage. Inspire. Make you laugh. Create a team. Launch a magazine. Tell a story. Cook a feast. All of that. Barbara “Babs” Rodriguez has worked on both sides of the publishing desk from both sides of the Atlantic ocean. Won international awards for her essays. Written and edited cookbooks. Traveled and told the tales. Ghost-written corporate histories, been a food editor for a gardening magazine, written endlessly about design. Conjured up magazines about family life, honeymoons, Mexico and home design. Funny and insatiably curious, she is a quick study who is deadline driven and stress-proof. Able to work both independently and as a valued team member, she is as smart and solid as she is witty. As an editor she can make anything better. As a writer, her voice is adaptable and memorable. She excels at translating anything complicated into a good read. As a mentor, she can make your team tighter. She developed a premier list of regional titles for Texas Monthly Press; contributed special sections on entertaining and cooking to Organic Gardening magazine; and created food, travel, gardening and lifestyle titles for a West Coast book packager. The challenge of any start-up thrills her. Her experience in launching magazines includes stints as Editor-at-Large for the start-up of Family Fun and Editor-in-Chief of Honeymoon magazine, which she created. In 2016, she was tapped to develop 817HOME and worked as the Editorial Director for that magazine as well as the Editor of luxury lifestyle magazine 360 West and it’s ancillaries. Babs is a matchmaker by nature, and for a time she represented a diverse stable of authors and illustrators as an agent and book packager. She has written for a variety of publications — from Texas Monthly to L.A. Style and Vogue — where readers unrelated to her write kind letters to the editor about her prose. She has published short fiction, caloric dining reviews, stories involving fish hooks and torches and is the author of The Interstate Gourmet. For 10 years, she was the Executive Director of the Rice University Publishing Program and many former students, now successful figures in publishing, stay in touch. As the Travel Matters columnist for Texas Highways magazine, she won a GOLD International Regional Magazine Award (IRMA). A recent book was the 20th anniversary cookbook for Central Market. She ghost wrote the centennial history of Blue Bell ice cream and has been an on-air spokesperson for KitchenAid. Her favorite claim to fame: writing the label copy for Beefeater Gin.