Author Bio
• Birth—August, 1953
• Where—Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Raised—New Cannan, Connecticut
• Education—B.A., Ithaca College; M.F.A, Columbia University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Maine
Bill Roorbach is an American novelist, short story and nature writer, memoirist, journalist, blogger and critic. He has authored fiction and nonfiction works including Big Bend, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and the O. Henry Prize. His recent novels include Life Among Giants (2012) and The Remedy for Love (2014). Roorbach and his wife, painter Juliet Karelsen, live in Maine. They have a daughter.
Background
Bill Roorbach was born in Chicago, Illinois. The next year his family moved to suburban Boston, Massachusetts, where he attended kindergarten, and in 1959 moved to New Canaan, Connecticut, where he attended public schools from first grade on, graduating from New Canaan High School in 1971. In 1976, he received his B.A. (cum laude) from Ithaca College.
During what he has called his "writing apprenticeship," Roorbach traveled and worked a series of different jobs. He played piano and sang in a succession of bands, bartended, worked briefly on a cattle ranch, and worked extensively as a carpenter, plumber, and handyman. In January, 1987, he enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts Writing Program of the Columbia University Graduate School of the Arts, where he was awarded a School of the Arts Fellowship, a Fellowship of Distinction and an English Department teaching assistantship. In addition, he was a fiction editor of Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Prose. He graduated in May 1990.
Soon after he published his first book, Summers with Juliet.
Teaching
Roorbach taught at the University of Maine at Farmington from 1991 to 1995 and subsequently at the Ohio State University from 1995 to 2001, winning tenure in 1998. In 2001, he quit his tenured position and returned with his family to Maine where he taught odd semesters as visiting full professor at Colby College.
He wrote full-time until Fall, 2004, when he was awarded the William H.P. Jenks Chair of Contemporary American Letters at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, a five-year position as full professor. He commuted from Maine to Worcester until April, 2009, when he returned to full-time writing.
Works
Roorbach sold his first book, Summers with Juliet shortly after graduating from Columbia. In 1998, he published Writing Life Stories. During the interim, he published short work, both fiction and nonfiction, in a number of magazines and journals, including The New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine, Playboy, Missouri Review, and Granta,
His first novel, The Smallest Color; a collection of stories, Big Bend; and a collection of essays, Into Woods, written incrementally during the preceding decade, were published in a flurry in 2000 and 2001. Big Bend was featured on the NPR program Selected Shorts, performed by the actor James Cromwell. Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: The Art of Truth, a widely used anthology, was published in 2002. A Place on Water, which Roorbach wrote with poet Wesley McNair and essayist Robert Kimber, was published in 2004. In 2005, Temple Stream: A Rural Odyssey was published. Roorbach based on an article of the same name he wrote for Harper’s Magazine. More recently, he published two novels, Life Among Giants in 2012 and The Remedy for Love in 2014.
Awards
2001 - Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction
1999 - National Endowment for the Arts Fellow
2002 - O. Henry Prize
2004 - Kaplan Foundation Fellow
2006 - Maine Prize for Literary Nonfiction
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrived 10/14/2014.)