Terry Roberts

Terry Lee Roberts (born July 30, 1956) is an American novelist and educator. He is the author of seven novels, most of which flow out of his heritage in southern Appalachia. He has also written extensively about American public education, specifically the teaching of critical and creative thinking via Socratic discussion. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina with his wife, Lynn.

Early life and education Roberts was born in Asheville, North Carolina in 1956 and lived near the small mountain town of Weaverville. He went to local public schools and earned degrees from the University of North Carolina at Asheville (BA), Duke University (MAT), and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (PhD). His family has lived in the mountains of Western North Carolina since the American Revolutionary War, farming in Madison County, North Carolina along the French Broad River. The town of Hot Springs in Madison county is a setting in his novels.

Career After earning an MAT from Duke University in 1979, Roberts taught high school English for nine years before returning to graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he earned a PhD with a dissertation on the fiction of Elizabeth Spencer. He is also a scholar of John Ehle and Thomas Wolfe.

He is the director emeritus of the National Paideia Center, an educational reform institute devoted to creating schools that are both more rigorous and more equitable. During his time as Director of the Paideia Center from 1992 to 2025, Roberts served as a consultant on the role of Socratic seminar dialogue in the classroom, educational leadership, and organizational development. He has written extensively about classroom instruction and, increasingly, about teaching critical and creative thinking in the context of an expanded definition of literacy.

Around 2005, Roberts began to write fiction inspired by the power of the past among people living in the southern Appalachian mountains. and the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction given annually for the best novel by a North Carolinian. within a community struggling to recover from the war. It won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award and the James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South. It continues the story of Stephen Robbins, the narrator of A Short Time to Stay Here. It was a 2022 International Thriller Writers Awards finalist in the Best Paperback Original category. Published in July 2022, The Sky Club, is a novel set in Asheville, North Carolina in the late 1920s and early 1930s at the time of the financial crash.

Roberts' sixth novel, The Devil Hath A Pleasing Shape (2024), continues the story of Stephen Robbins, the narrator of A Short Time To Stay Here and My Mistress' Eyes Are Raven Black. His seventh novel, In the Fullness of Time (2025) is set during the 1960s in Madison County, North Carolina. It was a finalist for the Southern Literary Review Book of the Year for 2025.

In 2019, Roberts was elected to membership in the North Caroliniana Society for his contributions to North Carolina's heritage. The same year, he was appointed President of the Thomas Wolfe Society, an association of scholars of the writer Thomas Wolfe. In 2021, Roberts was named a Director of the North Caroliniana Society and in 2024, became its vice-president.

Awards 2012. Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction for A Short Time to Stay Here. 2013. Sir Walter Raleigh Award for fiction for A Short Time to Stay Here. 2016. Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award for That Bright Land. 2016. Sir Walter Raleigh Award for fiction for That Bright Land. 2017. James Still Award for Writing about the American South for That Bright Land.

Publications Novels

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Literary criticism

Education

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Articles