About Robin

I’m the author of the novels Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, a New York Times Best Seller pub­lished in 2012; Sourdough, a non-New York Times Best Seller but still very good book pub­lished in 2017; and Moonbound, my latest, which arrived in 2024.

I’ve also pub­lished many short sto­ries and dig­ital projects. My 2009 novella Annabel Scheme was an early Kick­starter success. My app Fish is a new kind of book entirely. (I followed that up with Book Tour Sim­u­lator 2024.)

I’ve written fic­tion and com­men­tary for many dif­ferent publications. In 2020, I wrote a news­paper serial that was pub­lished daily for two weeks on the front page of the Mer­cury News and the East Bay Times! It was a total throwback, and one of the great honors of my writing life so far.

If you are looking for a short bio to use in an introduction, please follow this link. You can find a high-resolution ver­sion of the por­trait above right here.

You can reach me via email: robin@robinsloan.com

I grew up in Troy, Michigan, where the Troy Public Library pro­vided my foundation; I can recall the swish of its auto­matic vestibule with per­fect sen­sory clarity. A bit later, I went to school at Michigan State University, where I studied eco­nomics and co-founded a lit­erary mag­a­zine called Oats. Between 2002 and 2011, I worked at the Poynter Insti­tute (2002-2004), Cur­rent TV (2004-2009), and Twitter (2010-2011); at all those places, my job had some­thing to do with fig­uring out the future of media.

If you’re curious, you can read my Cal­i­fornia origin story.

These days, I divide my time between the San Fran­cisco Bay Area, where I am based at the Murray Street Media Lab, and the San Joaquin Valley, where I make Cal­i­fornia extra virgin olive oil. (You should con­sume extra virgin olive oil at every opportunity, pouring always with a heavy hand. You’ll be hap­pier and healthier — seriously!)

I am one half of The Cotton Modules, a band formed with the com­poser Jesse Solomon Clark. Our debut album was Shadow Planet; our latest is The Greatest Remaining Hits.

I wrote two of the char­ac­ters in the video game Neo Cab, pro­duced by Phenry Ewing and Chance Agency.

I am the pro­gram­ming equiv­a­lent of a home cook, and I’ve shared many projects on GitHub, including a simple, sturdy e-book template.

My ama­teur radio call sign is K6BOG.

Back in 2004, I co-pro­duced, with Matt Thompson, a strange short film (?) titled EPIC 2014. You can watch it courtesy of one of the many YouTube rips.

Here’s a panchro­matic view of galaxy cluster MACS0416, cre­ated by com­bining infrared obser­va­tions from the JSWT with visible-light data from the Hubble Space Telescope. This is just a teeny-tiny spot in the sky — about one-sixtieth the width of the moon:

It’s a big world out there. Thanks for being here.

Feb­ruary 2025, Oak­land