Literary Series Event with author Roxana Robinson

The Johann Fust Library Foundation is honored to present the highly acclaimed author, Roxana Robinson, as a featured speaker in our 2025-2026 Literary Series. Roxana spoke in our courtyard in 2014 when she launched her novel Sparta and in 2020 when she launched Dawson’s Fall.

On April 2, 2026, Roxana will be in conversation with Alice Gorman to discuss her newest novel, Leaving. The book tells the story of Sarah and Warren. Their college love story had ended in a single moment. Decades later, when a chance meeting brings them together, a passion ignites, threatening the foundations of the lives they’ve built apart.

Roxana is a sensitive writer with keen insights into human nature, with its frailty and flaws. She is the author of eleven books—seven novels, three collections of short stories, and the biography, Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life. Four of her books were chosen as New York Times Notable Books, and two were selected as New York Times Editors’ Choices.

Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Best American Short Stories, The Southampton Review, Epiphany, and elsewhere. Her work has been widely anthologized and broadcast on National Public Radio. Her books have been published in England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain.

Roxana has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony, and she was named a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library. Robinson has served on the Boards of both PEN and the Authors Guild; in addition, she also served as president of the Authors Guild. She has received the Barnes & Noble “Writers for Writers Award,” presented by Poets & Writers, and the Award for Distinguished Service to the Literary Community from the Authors Guild. She teaches in the MFA Program at Hunter College. She lives in New York City and northwestern Connecticut.