Roberta Harold
Roberta Harold photo by Wayne Fawbush.
Roberta Harold, author of Portrait of an Unseen Woman, is also the author of two historical mysteries, Heron Island and Murdered Sleep. She was born in Glasgow, Scotland, educated at convent schools there, and emigrated to the Washington, DC area with her family in 1965. Admitted with the second class of women to Princeton University in 1970, she graduated with the first in 1973 and went to medical school for a year and a half before admitting that she should have been an English major. This she eventually remedied with a master’s degree from Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English in 2001.
Moving to Vermont in 1977, she stumbled into a twenty-plus year career in community and economic development which included a stint as state director of USDA Rural Development for Vermont, New Hampshire, and for a time the Virgin Islands. She was appointed director of economic development in the first term of Vermont’s first woman governor, Madeleine Kunin, and later worked as an independent strategy consultant for small businesses and nonprofit organizations.
She won the Bread Loaf School of English poetry prize in 1999 and was first runner-up in 2002 in Seven Days' emerging writers short story contest. Heron Island, the first in the Dade Wyatt historical mystery series, was a Finalist in the Legacy Fiction awards of the Independent Publishers of New England (IPNE) and its sequel, Murdered Sleep, won the IPNE 2015 Genre Fiction award.
She has acted in community theater productions for many years. Favorite roles include Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, Ouiser Boudreau in Steel Magnolias, and Mistress Quickly in The Merry Wives of Windsor. She sings in the soprano section of Rock City, the rock’n’soul chorus of Barre, Vermont. A member since 1978 of The Mother of All Book Groups, founded in 1972, and a founding member of the Bardolators, a Shakespeare discussion group, she lives in Montpelier, Vermont with her husband and cats.
