American novelist, short story writer, memoirist, nature writer, journalist, blogger and critic.
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 of 1990. That June, he married the painter Juliet Karelsen. In 2000, their daughter was born.
Roorbach taught at the University of Maine at Farmington from 1991 to 1995. Immediately following that, 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 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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