Roberta Summers is an award winning author with a Creative Writing degree from San Juan College.  A current resident of Farmington, New Mexico, Summers lived in Hawaii for twenty-five years and on the slopes of Mauna Loa volcano in Hilo on the Big Island for five of those years. During that time a friend of hers was murdered by the Hawaiian Mafia. Her novel Pele’s Realm is titled after the Fire Goddess of the Volcanoes, Madam Pele, and is based upon that crime. She is also published in poetry and short stories and has served as an editor for the San Juan College Arts and Literary Magazine, Perspectives. She is a former co owner the publishing house, Silverjack Publishing which was housed at San Juan College’s Enterprise Center.

Summers is a member of Women Writing the West and Pikes Peak Writers in Colorado Springs where she served as a 2010, 2014 and 2015 contest judge. She is a former president of Trois Rivieras Fiction Writers. Currently active in the San Juan Writers Critique group, she has participated in book signings around the Southwest and authors’ panels at public libraries. She has appeared in numerous news articles and on public radio where she has been featured on the show “Write on Four Corners.”

Summers is currently working simultaneously on three novels—a  western with a female protagonist, Maryann Winslow; a romance set in Hawaii, Hanalei; and her passion, a completed manuscript about the plight of the Utah Downwinders, victims of radioactive fallout from nuclear testing in the Nevada desert during the 50s and 60s, Fatal Winds. Summers was raised in Southern Utah during the atomic bomb testing. She has seen young family die from fallout caused cancers. These deaths inspired her research and writing of Fatal Winds.

About her writing, she says, “I write because I have something to say, and I want to be heard—it’s a burning desire.”

Summers is a contest winner for Fatal Winds in the genre of historical fiction in the 2014 Pikes Peak Writers Contest. She served three years as a contest judge for their prestigious Zebulon contest.

Visit her website robertasummers.com.