Hi! I’m Robert. I’m an Associate Professor of English at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where I teach creative writing, digital literature, and the occasional course on zombies. As a fiction writer, my first book, TWO CALIFORNIAS, was published by C&R Press in 2019. Stories from that collection, described by PEN/Faulkner Award finalist Laird Hunt as “a fizzing, crackling, nightmarish wonderfest,” won the Copper Nickel and Normal School fiction competitions. Other stories have been published in The Normal School, Denver Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, and The Gettysburg Review. Excerpts from my current novel, THE ASTERISMS, have been published as the winning submissions for the Summer Literary Seminars and New Ohio Review national fiction prizes as well as in The Collagist, the Los Angeles Review, and the Masters Review anthology. As a literary citizen, I have attended residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Ucross, Saltonstall, and MacDowell. I am a past editor of the Amsterdam-based literary journal Versal and a current Associate Editor at Seneca Review.

There are past incarnations of me. I received my Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Utah, where I studied with the fiction writers Lance Olsen and Melanie Rae Thon. I also have an M.A. in Performance Art from San Francisco State University. In the 10 years between the two degrees, I lived in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Originally from Los Angeles, I received my undergraduate degree at UC Berkeley, where I lived in a (more-or-less) anarchist cooperative (those who know, don’t tell) and co-founded one of the first needle exchange programs in the country. I currently live in Rochester, NY with my partner Anne, our border collie Toby, and our baby Evan.

photo credits: Alexander Gouletas (left), Emily Patten (above), with special mention to Cassie the dog