Bill Roorbach


William 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. Roorbach's memoir in nature, Temple Stream, won the Maine Literary Award for Nonfiction, 2005. His novel, Life Among Giants, won the 2013 Maine Literary Award for Fiction.Bill Roorbach#cite note-18| And The Remedy for Love, also a novel, was one of six finalists for the 2014 Kirkus Fiction Prize. His book, The Girl of the Lake, is a short story collection published in June 2017. His most recent novel is Lucky Turtle, published in 2022.

Background

Bill Roorbach was born in 1953 in Chicago, Illinois. The next year, his family moved to suburban Boston, Massachusetts, where he attended kindergarten. In 1959 the family 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 was graduated from Ithaca College cum laude with a B.A. in Individual and Interdisciplinary Studies.
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 was graduated in May 1990.
Roorbach and his wife, painter Juliet Karelsen, have one daughter.

Academic career

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. In the winter of 2019 Roorbach returned to teaching as a faculty member of the Newport MFA in creative writing at Salve Regina College.

Work

Roorbach sold his first book. Summers with Juliet, to Houghton Mifflin 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, The Atlantic Monthly, ''Harper's Magazine, Playboy, The 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 adopted anthology, was published in 2002 by Oxford University Press. In 2004, A Place on Water, which Bill wrote with poet Wesley McNair and essayist Robert Kimber was published by Tilbury House, a craft publisher in Maine. In 2005, the Dial Press published Bill's book Temple Stream: A Rural Odyssey, which was based on Bill's article of the same name in Harper's Magazine and won the Maine Literary Award in 2005. Roorbach's novel, Life Among Giants, won the 2013 Maine Literary Award for Fiction.Bill Roorbach#cite note-18| And The Remedy for Love, also a novel, was one of six finalists for the 2014 Kirkus Fiction Prize.. His book, The Girl of the Lake, is a short story collection published in June 2017. His novel, Lucky Turtle'', was published in 2022.

Awards

Novels

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Nonfiction

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Short story collections

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Short stories

  • "Harbinger Hall" published in The Atlantic, December 2004; also included in The Girl of the Lake
  • Kiva—First appeared under the title "Investigation" in Iron Horse.
  • "The Fall"
  • "Murder Cottage"—Originally published in the short story collection, The Girl of The Lake.
  • "Princesa"—First appeared in the Missouri Review.
  • "Broadax, Inc."—First appeared in Ecotone.
  • "The Tragedie of King Lear"—Originally published in the short story collection, The Girl of The Lake.
  • "Some Should"
  • "Dung Beetle"
  • "The Girl of the Lake"—First appeared in ''Ecotone.''

Anthologies

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Essays

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Interviews

  • "NY Times Book Review of Life Among Giants by Bill Roorbach", NY Times, February 22, 2013]
  • "Bob Edwards Interviews Bill Roorbach about Life Among Giants"]