Robert Arellano


Robert Arellano is an American author, musician and educator from Talent, Oregon. His literary production includes pioneering work in electronic publishing, graphic-novel editions for Soft Skull Press/Counterpoint, and five novels published by Akashic Books.

Life

Arellano was born in 1969 and raised in Summit, New Jersey. After earning both Bachelor and Masters degrees from Brown University, he taught for a decade on Brown's Literary Arts faculty. In 1993 he used Storyspace to publish the Internet's first hyperzine, LSD-50, on a Gopher server. In 1996, Sonicnet serialized his groundbreaking hypertext novel Sunshine ’69 on the World Wide Web. Arellano is a founding member of the Literary Advisory Board of the Electronic Literature Organization and founding director of the Center for Emerging Media and Digital Arts at Southern Oregon University. He has been awarded the Oregon Literary Fellowship in Fiction and a Rockefeller Foundation Literary Arts Fellowship.
His most recent novel, Havana Libre, about the 1997 terrorist bombings of tourist destinations in Cuba, was published by Akashic Books in 2017. In 2012, Akashic published his novel Curse the Names about a reporter living and working in Los Alamos, New Mexico; and in 2010 his novel Havana Lunar was a finalist for an Edgar Allan Poe Award, nominated by the Mystery Writers of America. He has published fiction and essays in Jane, The Believer, Tin House, and The Village Voice.

Works

As Bob Arellano, he has played guitar with Will Oldham on the albums I See a Darkness, More Revery, and Joya as well as in performance and on recordings with Papa M, Jodie Jean Marston, the Pathetics and Havanarama. In March of 2000, Arellano organized an international music exchange in Havana and Pinar del Rio, Cuba called "Rock the Blockade" featuring Cuban performers in concert with Will Oldham, Papa M, Speed to Roam, and Havanarama.