Roberta Silman

Born in Brooklyn, NY on December 29, 1934, Roberta Silman was brought up on Long Island and received her B.A. with Honors in English literature from Cornell University in 1956. Three days after graduation she married Robert Silman, who became a structural engineer in the early years of their marriage, and they went on to have three children and several grandchildren.

She began to write as the assistant to the Science Editor at The Saturday Review Magazine in the late '50s while her husband got his second degree in engineering, and could have made a career in science writing since she was one of the first women to do it. However, she had always wanted to try her hand at fiction, and when her first child was born in 1961 she wrote her first short story, “Wedding Day.” She worked for ten years on her own while having two more children, then applied in 1972 to the graduate writing program at Sarah Lawrence. There she worked with Grace Paley and Jane Cooper, and received her MFA in 1975. Her first story to be published, “A Bad Baby,” appeared in The New Yorker in 1973.

In 1976 she published a children's book, Somebody Else's Child. Her first collection of stories, Blood Relations, (Atlantic-Little Brown, 1977) included stories published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Redbook, McCall’s, and Hadassah. Subsequent stories have been published in Mademoiselle, The Virginia Quarterly Review and other magazines and anthologies here and abroad; two have been read at Symphony Space and on NPR and have been cited in Best American Short Stories. Her most recent story, “Her Father’s Voice” appeared in VQR in Spring 2003.

Her first novel, Boundaries, (Atlantic-Little, Brown) appeared in 1979 and was followed by two more novels. Her reviews and Op Ed pieces have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and other newspapers. Somebody Else’s Child won the Child Study Association Award, Blood Relations won honorable mention for both the PEN Hemingway Prize and the Janet Kafka Prize. Boundaries won honorable mention for the Janet Kafka Prize, two stories were winners in the PEN Syndicated Fiction project in the early 1980s and another story won the National Magazine Award for Fiction in 1984. Boundaries was optioned for a movie by Linda Lavin but a movie was never made.

A recipient of both a Guggenheim Fellowship (1979-80) and an NEA Fellowship (1983), Ms. Silman has served on the NY CAPS Panel for Fiction and the Fiction Panel of the Massachusetts Cultural Council. A member of PEN, the Authors Guild, Poets and Writers, and Phi Beta Kappa, she has also served on the Advisory Council of the College of Arts & Sciences of Cornell University.

She has recently completed another novel, A Country of Their Own, and another story collection, Souls in Motion.