Nathan Curtis Roberts was born to Mormon parents in the California wine country; he grew up with an untreated and unacknowledged Disorder of Sexual Development (the subject of most of his recent nonfiction, including a memoir in progress). He began his higher education at Santa Rosa Junior College, and went on to earn degrees from The University of California at Berkeley, Reed College, and The University of Virginia (where he was a Henry Hoyns Fellow in fiction). He has taught creative writing at The University of Virginia and The College of New Jersey, but the more interesting half of his work history includes six months as a bouncer at a drag cabaret and three years as the administrator of a circus school. His stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Forge, River Teeth, Harvard Review, The Threepenny Review, and several other publications, a few of them lost to time (including Ontario Review and the defunct anthology series Best New American Voices). He was a finalist for the 2022 Granum Prize and the inaugural Harvard Review chapbook competition, and has also received honors from The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and The American Society of Magazine Editors.

He’s in the process of selling a manuscript called SALT COAST, which is either a novel with chapters that are extremely different from each other, or a collection of very linked stories. (Think A Visit From the Goon Squad, except it’s about 160 years of queer Utah.)

A former drummer for the Flaming Lips is named Nathan Roberts, and there’s a South African model of that name, and a quilter called Miriam Nathan-Roberts used to do pretty well in the search results, but it was a Nathan Roberts flat-earther who inspired our Nathan Roberts to start using his middle name professionally. NCR currently lives in Utah, but there’s no way to know how much longer he can take it.