Robert was born in Maryland in 1972 and spent his early years in Japan, Hawaii, California, and West Virginia before his family returned to Maryland and settled in Bryans Road, a small, one-stoplight community south of Washington. In 1990, Robert moved to New York to attend Columbia where he twice won the college playwriting prize as well as the fiction award and the Henry Evans Traveling Fellowship which funded a writing/research trip to Greece and Italy. He spent his twenties catering, temping and leading tours of New York while writing for the theater (A Wedding Album, The Pennington Plot, A Tulip Economy, and A Home Without). He was the writer-in-residence for The Working Group and a dramaturge on Marc Wolf’s award-winning solo play, Another American: Asking and Telling. Suspension is his first novel. He currently lives in upper Manhattan where he is at work on his next novel, a new play and several Little Bytes.