Roxana Robinson

Roxana Robinson is the author of Dawson’s Fall, four earlier novels including Sparta, three story collections, and the biography, Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life. Four of these were New York Times Notable Books. Robinson’s work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper’s, BASS, and elsewhere. She was named a Literary Lion by the NYPL, was a finalist for the NBCC Balakian Award, and has received fellowships from the NEA, the MacDowell Colony and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is the President of the Authors Guild.

Known for exploring the complexity of familial bonds and fault lines, Roxana Robinson is the author of six novels: Dawson’s Fall (2019), Sparta (2013), Cost (2009), Sweetwater (2003), This is My Daughter (1998), and Summer Light (1987). Cost was recognized as a National Book Critics Circle Recommended Reads, The New York Times Editors’ Choice, and The Washington Post Five Best Fiction Books of the Year. In her recent suspenseful novel Sparta, Robinson explores the fissures between military experience and civilian life through a portrait of a returning veteran, and the costs of war. In 2014, Robinson received the Marine Corps’ James Webb Award for Distinguished Fiction for Sparta. Sparta was also shortlisted for the 2015 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

“[Robinson] has crept into corners of human experience [that] each of us is terrified to approach … the implacable tragedies that shred our sense of how the world should work.”—Ron Charles

Robinson has three collections of short stories: A Perfect Stranger and Other Stories (2006), Asking for Love (1996), A Glimpse of Scarlet and Other Stories (1991), as well as an award-winning biography, Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life (1989). Her work has been widely anthologized, broadcasted on NPR, and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Vogue, One Story, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and The MacDowell Colony. She has also been elected as President of the Authors Guild.

Robinson has also has written widely on American art and issues pertaining to ecology and the environment. As a biographer and scholar of nineteenth and early twentieth century American art, Robinson has had articles in Arts, ARTnews, and Art & Antiques as well as in exhibition catalogs for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Katonah Museum of Art, and other institutions. She is also a gardener and garden writer, and her essays in this field have appeared in Horticulture, House and Garden, House Beautiful, and Fine Gardening.

After growing up in New Hope, Pennsylvania, Robinson attended Bennington College and received a B.A. degree in English Literature from the University of Michigan. In 2015, she received the inaugural Rosati Visiting Writer Fellowship at the David Rubinstein Library at Duke University. She has taught at the University of Houston and Wesleyan University, and is currently teaching in the MFA Program at Hunter College, CUNY..