Barbara La Rocco

Barbara La Rocco is an author, publisher, environmental advocate, and lifelong traveler whose work explores the places where history, culture, literature, and the natural world meet.

For La Rocco, the water has always been a way into the world.

She is the founder and president of Going Coastal, Inc., a nonprofit publishing and educational organization dedicated to recovering the natural, cultural, and maritime histories of America's waterfronts and helping people discover, understand, and protect the places where land meets water. What began as a fascination with New York's shoreline grew into a body of books, maps, research, and public education devoted to the idea that every waterfront has a story.

Her books include Going Coastal New York City, a guide to the city's waterfront journeys, and work connected to A Maritime History of New York, for which she wrote the modern epilogue. She has also helped bring new attention to Helen Worden's remarkable 1934 account, Round Manhattan's Rim, a pioneering journey around Manhattan's shoreline. Through these projects, La Rocco has explored New York not simply as a city, but as a maritime landscape shaped by rivers, harbors, islands, commerce, immigration, conflict, recreation, and memory.

Her path to writing was unconventional. Her earlier career took her through event, entertainment, sponsorship, and partnership marketing, including work with the New York Racing Association and the Food Network, as well as resorts and corporate conference centers. Her professional life brought her into contact with athletes, chefs, artists, entertainers, and travelers, while her growing commitment to environmental stewardship led to community conservation programs and recognition including an EPA Environmental Quality Award.

Eventually, her curiosity about the world became the organizing principle of her life as a writer and publisher.

Through Be the Rock Press, La Rocco publishes works that cross the boundaries between history, culture, literature, food, and lived experience. Her projects range from the wonderfully irreverent The Mafia Cookbook to Aphorisms from In Search of Lost Time, her exploration of Marcel Proust's observations on memory, art, travel, water, and the poetry of existence.

To La Rocco, these topic are connected by the same impulse: to look closely, follow a story, and discover what lies beneath the familiar.

Barbara La Rocco writes about the places we travel through, the histories we inherit, the books that shape us, and the waters that connect them.