katrina roberts

Katrina Roberts, a graduate of Harvard University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is the Mina Schwabacher Professor of English and the Humanities at Whitman College, where she directs the Visiting Writers Reading Series.

Born on the Jersey shore and raised mostly in small towns up and down the coast of New England, Roberts spent the year after college (where she had the chance to work with Seamus Heaney) writing on a Briggs Literary Traveling Fellowship, and learning the ways of wine-making in Switzerland, Italy, and France.

After a stint on the island of Iowa City (amidst corn and lively conversation), and a decade's run of adjunct teaching in Cambridge, MA (Harvard Extension, Boston University, Holy Cross, Keene State College, University of Southern Maine, Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking, etc.), she moved to the pacific northwest to teach at Whitman College, and to get some grapevines in the ground.

She and her husband, Jeremy Barker, an artist and distiller native to Walla Walla, are the proprietors of and winemakers for Tytonidae Cellars, which they started in 2003, as well as founders of the Walla Walla Distilling Company.

They can generally find their three small children playing with barn cats in the good dirt somewhere not far from the vineyard.