Erin Roberts is a Black speculative fiction and game writer and a Provost's Early Career Fellow in the English Department at UT-Austin. She builds worlds, develops lore, and writes adventures for tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) across systems, with recent credits including contributions to the Nebula Award finalist Journeys Through the Radiant Citidel(D&D), an adventure and new location created as an homage/love letter to the Black experience in the US South; Pathfinder: Lost Omens Travel Guide, which takes readers on an in-depth exploration of the world of Golarion through the eyes of in-world NPCs; and Hunter: The Reckoning, which places players in a world full of supernatural threats that they have only recently become aware of and decided to fight back against. She has also been part of the script writing team for several seasons of the long-form audio narrative exergame Zombies, Run!, and created/coded two interactive fiction pieces.
Erin is a graduate of the Odyssey Writers Workshop and holds an MFA from the University of Southern Maine. She has been awarded the Speculative Literature Foundation's 2017 Diverse Worlds Grant and Diverse Writers Grant and a 2019 Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council, and has been selected to attend Hedgebrook in 2022 and Storyknife in 2023 as a Writer in Residence. One of her stories, "Sour Milk Girls", was included in the Best Science Fiction of the Year, vol. 4, The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2019, and the Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2019.
In addition to teaching at University of Texas at Austin, Erin is one of the hosts of the weekly writing advice podcast Writing Excuses, alongside Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, Howard Tayler, and DongWon Song.