Chef and culinary historian Sallie Ann Robinson was born on August 4, 1958 on Daufuskie Island, South Carolina to Albertha Robinson Stafford and Alton Ward, Sr. She attended Mary Fields School on Daufuskie Island. Robinson was featured as the character Ethel in the 1972 memoir, The Water is Wide written by her teacher Pat Conroy. She was one of a handful of students to have Pat Conroy as a teacher, a man she says changed her and her classmates’ lives. She then moved to Savannah, Georgia, to attend Bartlett Middle School, but returned to South Carolina, where she graduated from Bluffton’s H.E. McCracken High School in 1975. 
 She is the author of Gullah Home Cooking the Daufuskie Way: Smokin’ Joe Butter Beans, Ol’ ’Fuskie Fried Crab Rice, Sticky-Bush Blackberry Dumpling, and Other Sea Island Favorites and Cooking the Gullah Way, Morning, Noon, and Night and coauthor of Daufuskie Island. She is a sixth-generation Gullah born on Daufuskie Island in South Carolina and has dedicated herself to chronicling and sharing Gullah recipes, dialect, and folklore. Her life and work have been showcased in National Geographic, Southern Living, Bon Appetit, Garden & Gun, and The South Magazine, among other publications. She has also appeared on the Food Network, the Travel Channel, and Georgia Public Broadcasting.