Jean Roberta was born in the western United States, and moved to the prairie region of Canada as a teenager with her parents. In her last year of high school, she won a major award in a student writing contest sponsored by a major Canadian financial institution. All nine student winners were asked to write a brief passage on "what Canada means to me" for publication in The Canadian Magazine, a weekend newspaper supplement. Most of the other winners took their inspiration from the national anthem ("O Canada"), but Jean wrote: "Canada is a small but useful ball bearing in the greasy machinery of world politics." Thus she began her literary career by writing the unexpected. She has continued down this road ever since.
Jean Roberta still lives in Canada, where she has taught English at the local university for over 25 years, and now also teaches credit courses in Creative Writing.
Her diverse short stories (mostly erotic) have appeared in over one hundred print anthologies, an out-of-print novel, an out-of-print story collection, three single-author collections (Obsession, Each Has a Point, The Princess and the Outlaw) and a novella, The Flight of the Black Swan. Anthologies including her work have won awards from Lambdalit, EPIC (Electronically Published Internet Connection) and Independent Publishers Association. She has written news articles, scholarly non-fiction, blog posts and reviews.
In 2004, her one-act play about the politics of smoking and gender identities, Smoke and Mirrors, was performed by professional actors as part of Loud 'n Queer, an annual event produced by the local Globe Theatre.
Jean believes in tolerating everything except intolerance.
The opinion pieces she wrote for a monthly column, Sex Is All Metaphors (based on a line in a poem by Dylan Thomas), are available as an e-book. Under her actual family name, she contributed a chapter to The Vampire Goes to College: Essays on Teaching with the Undead, and she co-edited an anthology of scholarly articles: OutSpoken: Perspectives on Queer Identities (University of Regina Press, 2013), to which she contributed an article on a controversial "lesbian" novel, The Well of Loneliness (1928).
She married her long-term, Chilean-born female partner, Mirtha Rivera, on Halloween weekend in 2010. (Mirtha made the historical outfits for both of them.) More here: www.JeanRoberta.com
