About Robert Archambeau
Robert Archambeau possesses the world’s least interesting international identity.
Of French-Canadian descent, he was born in Rhode Island, raised in Canada, and spent his summers in the family’s 18th century farmhouse in Maine or in a canoe on Rice Lake in the Canadian wilderness.
As an art school brat, he always felt it was inevitable that he would end up making art or movies, but his fate was grimmer still. After a brief stint as a deckhand, he fell in with a group of poets and pursued graduate studies in English.
While pursuing his PhD, he moved to Chicago, got married on a sailboat and worked at a secondhand bookstore, where he wrote a dissertation on Wordsworth and well as the poems that would comprise his first collection of verse, Home and Variations.
After some astonishingly good luck on the academic job market, Archambeau became a professor of English at Lake Forest College, in a leafy and charming suburb on Chicago’s north shore, much-storied as the hometown of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tom Buchanan.
At Lake Forest, he teaches 19th century British literature, Irish literature, creative writing, and literary theory. He co-founded and edited a poetry magazine, Samizdat. In addition, he has wrote two scholarly studies, three collections of essays, and another poetry collection, The Kafka Sutra.
His first novel, Alice B. Toklas is Missing, will be followed by sequels, the first of which, The Bloomsbury Forgery, will appear from Regal House in 2026.
Robert lives near Chicago with his wife and teenager, enjoying art galleries, collecting antiques, and an excessive amount of vintage clothing.
