Bill Roorbach
| Bill Roorbach | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | William Roorbach August , 1953 Chicago Illinois, United States |
| Occupation | Novelist, short story writer, memoirist, nature writer, journalist, blogger, critic |
| Nationality | American |
| Notable works |
Big Bend Life Among Giants |
Bill Roorbach (born August, 1953 Chicago, Illinois) is an American novelist, short story and nature writer, memoirist, journalist, blogger and critic.
Roorbach has authored fiction and nonfiction works including Big Bend, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and the O. Henry Prize. Most recently he published the novel Life Among Giants.
Bill Roorbach was born August, 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, Elysia Pearl.
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.
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