Robin Black
Author of:
If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This |
Winner of the Faulkner Society's 2005 Gold Medal for Best Short Story
Robin Black 's first story collection, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, has been published by Random House, available in bookstores now. The book will also be brought out by six foreign publishers and translated into four other languages. Robin holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. Her stories and essays have appeared in numerous publications including The Southern Review, One Story, The Georgia Review, Colorado Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, and The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. I (Norton, 2007). She is the recipient of grants from the Leeway Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the Sirenland Conference and her work has been noticed for Special Mention by the Pushcart Prizes on four occasions and also deemed Notable in The Best American Essays, 2008 and The Best Nonrequired Reading, 2009. She is currently at work on a novel, also to be published by Random House and overseas. Since receiving her MFA, she has taught Advanced Fiction Writing at Arcadia University and worked extensively with individual students. In 2010, she will be teaching at Bryn Mawr College. Robin will be a member of the faculty at Words & Music, 2010, appearing with her agent, Henry Dunnow, on the panel, Late Bloomers. She also will appear with Sena Jeter Naslund for the Master Class discussion: Enduring Questions. If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This has been named as one of five books to look forward to, by the Louisville Courier Journal, which said: Here’s a wonderfully rich and rewarding story collection by a debut writer that’s not to miss for fans of Alice Munro or Lorrie Moore.
This collection of short stories might more accurately be called a collection of short novels, such is their richness of characterization and plot. And the writing! It’s the best I’ve seen in years, literally. I was immediately engaged with and entertained by every story here, without exception, and I was moved and enlightened by them, as well. Robin Black is an old soul who is a new addition to my short list of favorite authors. She is worthy of every bit of the high praise that is sure to come her way.
– Elizabeth Berg, author of The Last Time I Saw You
Robin Black knows people. She knows us, she loves us, she takes pity on us and she offers us back to ourselves in clear-eyed and graceful prose. Her people are alive on these pages in all their glory–heartache and joy, infidelity and loyalty–and stay with us.
–Amy Bloom, author of Away and Where the God of Love Hangs Out
Robin Black’s men and women have been around the block—in fact, they’ve done laps around the block—and are suffused with a fierce and hard-won knowledge about life, about love and loss. It’s wisdom that fills these characters. Like bulletins from the front, these magnificent stories shine a light on what it means to be human.
– Dani Shapiro, author of Devotion
Robin Black’s stories are beautifully measured and composed in their engagements with emotional crises that are harrowingly intense, if not catastrophic. Few first collections – few collections of any sort — are as intelligent and as moving about both the durability of love and the implacability of loss, or about the ways in which contingency can undo and remake us; about, finally, the damage done and the repair work to come.
–Jim Shepard, author of Like You’d Understand, Anyway
These stories are full of surprises. They start with the familiar, drawing the reader in with the beauty and precision of their prose until, suddenly, in the middle of a suburban family drama, Italian bandits appear. But what makes If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This such an exquisite collection is the way Robin Black brings these same unpredictable elements into the emotional lives of her characters, creating that special kind of literary magic, where a reader experiences everything, right alongside, and it all feels new.
– Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief
| Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society 624 Pirate’s Alley, New Orleans, LA 70116 phone: (504) 586-1609 or (504) 525-5615 fax: (504) 522-9725 info@wordsandmusic.org |
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