Roberta Payne
WRITER, TRANSLATOR & ARTIST
Roberta Payne is a writer, translator, and artist. A National Merit Scholar, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford in Classics and received an MA in Italian from UCLA. Her second MA, from Harvard, was in Romance Languages. She received a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Denver. She has taught Latin and Italian on the college level.
Roberta has published nonfiction in The Gettysburg Review, Narrative, Calyx, Aeon, Shenandoah, The Rumpus, The Potomac Review, and Pembroke Magazine.
She’s translated and published four books, including A Selection of Modern Italian Poetry in Translation (McGill-Queens UP).
Her memoir is titled Speaking to My Madness: How I Searched for Myself in Schizophrenia; and her debut novel, My Mother’s Autobiography, is now available from Jaded Ibis Press. She is currently marketing a second novel.
Roberta’s abiding interests are languages and psychiatry. She has published four personal essays on mental health with Boston and Oxford UPs, including one in The Oxford Handbook of Psychiatric Ethics. She has spoken at national symposia and has been featured speaker in a webinar from the National Institute of Mental Health. A member of the board of directors of The Mental Health Center of Denver for thirteen years, she also lectured at the medical school of the University of Colorado for twenty years.
Now retired, she teaches Greek privately. She also does Outsider Art and has sold six magazine covers.
Writing memoir and autofiction — you never get used to the fact that you can still go an inch farther out on the limb of self-revelation. It has been a way of loving, or of coming to love.
TESTIMONIALS
Read Reviews by My Readers
"[My Mother's Autobiography] is one of the best books I’ve read in the past few years. It’s one of those books that you begin and just can’t put down. Roberta Payne tells the story of Anne Hope with such honesty and compassion. In one part, Anne chooses a ring that is “something simple and elegant.” This book, simple and elegant, is a gift to Anne Hope and to us all."
Paulette Fire
"I highly recommend My Mother's Autobiography as your next read. Payne's personal history illuminates this mother-daughter story of schizophrenia and captures the time period perfectly. I was riveted from page one."
Windy Lynn Harris
"[My Mother's Autobiography is a] profound story of mental illness and its impact on family and friends from a gifted author."
Gordon Tucker
"[Speaking to My Madness] is a book that makes you a better person for having read it. The term "memoir" doesn't do it justice, though it is one, a very, very good one. It is, though, at least as much a meditation on Iiving, on what is good in life, on the power of kindness, and above all, on courage. Not to be missed."