Robert Alderman

Professional Bio

Robert Alderman has taught writing courses at the Pennsylvania State University, the University of Delaware, and the University of South Florida. He holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, and in December 2021, Robert officially founded Pulp Hummock Press, a small publishing company with a focus on sword & sorcery fiction and tabletop roleplaying game products.

Since that time, Robert's first book series, Gods of the Forbidden North, has amassed $300,000 in crowdfunding pledges on Kickstarter from more than 3,500 generous backers, and in February 2025, the campaign was designated as a "Project We Love" by that platform's staff members. Pulp Hummock Press has also received public recognition as a Kickstarter Backer Favorite. After serving as the project's lead designer and creative director managing an international team of writers, artists, cartographers, and layout designers, Robert's new series debuted at #9 on OneBookShelf's Top 100 Bestselling Titles list and quickly became a Platinum Best Seller, a milestone less than 1% of products in the tabletop roleplaying game industry ever achieve. And finally, this past summer, the series won the ENNIE Judges Spotlight Award at GenCon 2024 in Indianapolis.

From 2018 - 2022, Robert served as the Senior Director of Global Outreach & Curriculum Development at a California-based Catholic educational nonprofit founded by the former president of Gonzaga University, Robert J. Spitzer. In that role, he traveled across the globe throughout North America, Europe, and Asia giving highly-attended lectures to thousands of undergraduate students on the apparent contradiction between science and religion, where he discussed such topics as the implications of the 2003 BGV Theorem, evidence of the fine-tuning of our universe, medical research on near-death experiences (NDEs), the findings of the 1978 Shroud of Turin Research Project, as well as contemporary metaphysical proofs for the intelligibility of an unconditioned reality and its identification with an unrestricted act of thinking. He also completed a week-long training seminar for development directors titled "The Art, the Science, and Technology of Major Gift Fundraising" at Nashville, TN's Institute for Charitable Giving in late 2021.

Robert has published fiction and poetry in So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library, The Wrath-Bearing Tree, Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, The Mailer Review, and various other literary magazines. His poem "Watch for the Patterns, Watch for the Wires" won the Center for American Literary Studies (CALS) "Secret" contest in 2015, and was later published in Southeast Missouri State University Press's Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, Volume 6. He was a semi-finalist for The Poet's Billow 2013 Atlantis Award. In 2011, he won the Scholarly and Creative Excellence Award in the Fine Arts at the University of South Florida. That same year, he was also the recipient of the Thomas E. Sanders Scholarship in Creative Writing.

Finally, Robert served his country honorably for 8 years as an enlisted soldier in the U.S. Army Reserve and Florida Army National Guard.