Michael Aaron Rockland

Michael Rockland, author

I have wanted to be a writer since the age of 16 when I realized there were other things in life besides girls and being a jock. Although I have been a professor at Rutgers University thirty-nine years I still think of myself primarily as a writer. I thought of myself as a writer too in my seven years in the diplomatic service, when I wrote my doctoral dissertation in my spare time while serving in several U.S. embassies overseas. What may be a little unusual about me as a writer is how I go back and forth between fiction, journalism, and scholarship, and have even worked in film, feeling comfortable in all but especially ambitious about my fiction. I guess I have not only wanted to be a writer but an artist. One of my happiest moments is when my first novel, A Bliss Case, was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year after receiving a smashing review in the Times.