Bill Roorbach

Bill Roorbach (born August, 1953 Chicago, Illinois) is an American novelist, short story writer, memoirist, nature writer, journalist, blogger, and critic.

Life
In 1954 his family moved to suburban Boston. In 1959 the family moved to New Canaan, Connecticut, where he attended public schools. He was graduated in 1976 from Ithaca College cum laude with a B.A. in Individual and Interdisciplinary Studies. He was graduated from Columbia University with an MFA in 1990. He was a fiction editor of Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Prose. He married the painter Juliet Karelsen, in June 1990. In 2000, their daughter, Elysia, was born. Bill taught at the University of Maine at Farmington, from 1991 to 1995. He taught 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 for three years of writing full-time. In 2004, he was awarded the William H.P. Jenks Chair in Contemporary American Letters at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, a five-year position as full professor. He commuted from Maine. [1] In 2009, he returned to full-time writing, and completed a new novel, The High Side, to be published by Algonquin Books in spring, 2012. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, [2], Playboy, The Missouri Review, [3] Granta,[4] and many other magazines and journals. His story "Big Bend" was featured on the NPR program Selected Shorts, performed by the actor James Cromwell.

Awards
• 2004-2009 William H.P. Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters, College of the Holy Cross
 * 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

Works

 * (paperback 2003)
 * (paperback: Counterpoint Press, 2003 )