Degrees: BA Hons, MA (Regina)

Welcome! I am Jean Roberta, a writer of erotica, fantasy, historical fiction, drama, poetry and non-fiction. I have taught English classes in a Canadian prairie university for almost a quarter-century. I moved to Canada from the United States with my family as a teenager in the 1960s, and won my first writing award in a national student writing contest for a story I typed on a manual typewriter at age eighteen. I was married to a man in the 1970s, upgraded to a woman in the 1980s, and married her legally in 2010.

My first erotic novel, Prairie Gothic, was accepted by a British e-publisher in 2002, and disappeared when the publisher closed shop. My bisexual erotic historical novella, The Flight of the Black Swan, is now available from Lethe Press in various forms, and will soon be an audiobook. Approximately 100 of my erotic stories have appeared in print anthologies, including the annual Best Women's Erotica and Best Lesbian Erotica, several volumes of erotic fantasy (Best Erotic Fantasy and Science Fiction, Best Fantastic Erotica, Like a Sword from Circlet, Rumpled Silk Sheets: Lesbian Fairy Tales from Ravenous Romance) and spanking anthologies (Spank! Best S/M Erotica 3, Bottoms Up, Wicked Pleasures). I wrote two single-author collections of erotic stories, both out of print and being considered for re-publication. (Prairie Gothic is also due for a makeover.)

In 2001, I gave a presentation on erotica and censorship to the Department of English where I teach. This script became an article, and it gave rise to a talk on censorship which was televised in 2009 in the local Chapters bookstore. In 2010, I ran a writing workshop at Camp Fyrefly, an annual summer camp for queer youth. I co-taught a grammar workshop with Shar Azade at the first conference of the Erotic Authors Association in Las Vegas in 2011. My rants and reviews can be found in various places. Sixty of my reviews are in the archives here: www.eroticarevealed.com. I currently blog on the 26th of each month here: www.erotica-readers.blogspot.com and every two weeks here: www.ohgetagrip.blogspot.com

The twenty-five opinion pieces I wrote for a monthly column in 2008-2010, "Sex Is All Metaphors" (based on a line in a poem by Dylan Thomas) is available as an e-book, Sex Is All Metaphors, here: www.eroticanthology.com/metaphors.htm All profits go to support the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom.

"Jean Roberta" once promised her parents not to use their unusual family name for her queer and erotic writing, and thus was born her thin-disguise pen name. She torments the young by teaching mandatory first-year English courses in a Canadian university, where she is also a consulting editor for the literary journal.

Jean immigrated to Canada from the United States as a teenager with her family. In her last year of high school, after two years of life in Canada, she won a major award in a national student writing contest. In 1988, a one-woman publisher in Montreal published a book of Jean's lesbian stories, Secrets of the Invisible World. When the publisher went out of business, the book went out of print.

With encouragement from lesbian friends who wanted to see more explicit sex in her fiction, she began sending out her erotica in 1998. Since then, her diverse erotic stories have appeared in over eighty print anthologies, not including magazines and websites. Jean's true "coming-out" story appears in Up All Night: Adventures in Lesbian Sex; other autobiographical stories are "The Trouble with Claws," in Best Women's Erotica 2003 and "Gabrielle's Fountain" in First-Timers: True Stories of Lesbian Awakening.