ROSEMARIE ROBOTHAM
Literary Alchemy

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ROSEMARIE ROBOTHAM is an editor, writer, book coach and literary collaborator. She wrote and illustrated her first book at age 5, and published it using red twine and a classic accordion-fold binding. Her mother was impressed.

 

Rosemarie started her career traveling the globe as a reporter and writer for Life magazine, after it was reincarnated as a monthly. She later served as a senior editor at Simon & Schuster, and as the deputy editor of Essence magazine, where she won numerous awards. She has been an acquiring editor for Shebooks, publisher of short-form narratives by women in the genres of memoir, fiction, and literary journalism.

 

The coauthor of the award-winning Spirits of the Passage: The Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Seventeenth Century, she is also the author of Jamaica Dreams, a memoir, Zachary’s Wings, a novel, and the editor of two collections of fiction and memoir, Mending the World and The Bluelight Corner. She has been a collaborative writer on numerous other works, including Lovely One, the No. 1 New York Times bestselling memoir by Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who in 2022 became the first Black woman to be appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States in its 233-year history.

 

Rosemarie currently lives with her husband and their two children in Harlem, just up the street from Barnard College and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, her alma maters. She once spent a charmed month as a writer-in-residence at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, NY, and dreams about it still. An intuitive conceptual editor and meticulous line editor, Rosemarie is known for her sure sense of story and voice, respect for deadlines, and warm collaborative approach. Her goal is always literary alchemy—magic with words.