Roxana Robinson (née Barry; born 30 November 1946) is an American novelist and biographer whose fiction explores the complexity of familial bonds and fault lines.

Robinson was born in Pine Mountain, Kentucky, and raised in New Hope, Pennsylvania, the child of educators Stuyvesant Barry and Alice Scoville.

Equally skilled in both long and short form fiction, Robinson is the author of four novels, three-story collections and a biography.

Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic, and Best American Short Stories, and been widely anthologized and broadcast on National Public Radio.

She was named a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library, served as a Trustee of PEN American Center[3] and is currently president of the Authors Guild.

Robinson is passionate about environmental concerns, explored in her novel Sweetwater, and has published numerous op-eds in the Boston Globe, International Herald Tribune, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

With Cost, Robinson moved into a larger arena, and, as critic Ron Charles of the Washington Post has said, she "has crept into corners of human experience [that] each of us is terrified to approach ... the implacable tragedies that shred our sense of how the world should work".

[8] In a New York Times interview on the extensive research she did, Robinson said, “'Cost' has a larger reach than my previous books, both in terms of emotional risk and experience.

"[9] Spotlighted for her short fiction in the New York Times Book Review, Robinson compared writing a story to "like doing a cliff dive, the kind that only works when the wave hits just right.

You take a deep breath and throw yourself over, hoping that, by the time you hit, the wave will be back, wild and churning, and full of boiling energy.