Robin Wasserman
Robin Wasserman is an American author whose work spans young adult fiction, adult literary fiction, and cultural criticism. She is best known in the YA world for her Skinned trilogy — comprising Skinned (2008), Crashed (2009), and Wired (2010) — a science fiction series exploring questions of consciousness, identity, and what it means to be human in an era of technological body modification, which became popular with teenage readers drawn to its smart philosophical underpinnings and compelling protagonist.
Her adult literary debut, Girls on Fire (2016), was a departure: a dark, psychologically intense novel about female adolescence, obsessive friendship, and violence set in a small Pennsylvania town in the early 1990s. The book draws on the Satanic panic, teen suicide, and the particular social brutality of high school to create a portrait of girlhood as both survival and complicity. It was praised by critics for its literary ambition and for its unflinching portrayal of teenage female experience.
Wasserman has a Ph.D. from Harvard University in American history and has brought a historian’s attention to cultural context to both her fiction and her criticism. Her essays and cultural writing have appeared in various publications, and she has been a contributor to literary conversations about genre, gender, and the serious possibilities of speculative fiction.
She continues to write both literary fiction and criticism, and her range — from YA science fiction to adult literary thriller — marks her as a writer whose ambitions exceed any single category. She lives and writes on the East Coast.
