"Jean Roberta" is the thin-disguise pen name of a writer who promised her elderly parents not to kill them prematurely by flaunting the family name in print. She torments the barely-willing by teaching mandatory first-year English courses at a Canadian prairie university, where she is also a consulting editor for the
literary journal.

In the past, she has worked as a typist and freelance editor, a researcher, an amateur actor/playwright, an activist for women's and GLBT rights, an art model and a call girl. Since 1998, she and her long-term partner have sung in the local GALA (queer) choir, for which the director/composer has composed two suites of songs based on choir members' lives, Watershed Stories 1 and 2. Performances at choir festivals have won rave reviews, and the Canadian Roadcasting Corporation produced a recording. The CD will be available for sale in spring 2006.

Jean writes in various genres and flavours. She won a major award in a student writing contest in her last year of high school, and wrote book reviews and occasional articles for local publications throughout her twenties. For two years in the 1980s, she produced a lesbian newsletter with sporadic help. In 1988, a collection of her lesbian short stories, Secrets of the Invisible World, was published by a one-woman publisher in Montreal. The book was described by friends as a "tease" (short on explicit sex), then it went out of print when the publisher went out of business.

Inspired by readers' comments, she began sending out her erotica in 1998. Since then, her erotic stories have appeared in anthologies such as the Best Lesbian Erotica (2000, 2001, 2004, 2005, 2006) series and the Best Women's Erotica (2000, 2003, 2005, 2006) series from Cleis Press, in two Wicked Words anthologies (#3 and #8), soon to be reprinted by Black Lace Publications in England, and numerous others (see list of published fiction). Several of her stories have won awards in website contests. Her BDSM novel, Prairie Gothic, is downloadable from the website Amatory Ink (www.amatory-ink.co.uk).

For those who crave raw autobiography, the story of her first lesbian experience ("Family Gathering") is included in Up all Night: Adventures in Lesbian Sex (Alyson Publications, 2004). A story about her life as a call girl and single mother, "The Trouble with Claws," appears in Best Women's Erotica 2003. Jean's darker fantasies have appeared in Cthulhu Sex magazine, in Closet Desire IV: Flights Of Fantasy (iUniverse, 2003) and in Monsters (Torquere Press, 2004).

Jean's reviews and editorials appeared in her column, "In My Jeans" on the website Blue Food from December 2003 until August 2005. They still appear in the "reviews" section of website The Dominant's View, in "Cover Stories" in website Clean Sheets, and in print journal Batteries Not Inclued. Her essay (originally a talk) on the history of erotica and censorship was published in Arrington Lesbian Fiction Quarterly as "Clever Curll and Other Culprits: Lust and Reading Under Fire" (see relevant section of website.) Several of her articles on lesbian life have appeared in Girlfriends magazine.

Jean has found that there is usually a thin line between fiction and reality.  

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