Roberta Fernández is a Tejana novelist, scholar, critic, and arts advocate. She is known for her novel Intaglio: A Novel in Six Stories and for her work editing several award-winning women writers. Intaglio has been called "a deftly-narrated coming-of-age novel" consisting of sensitive portraits of six extraordinary women from the Texas-Mexican border region. They serve as role models for the narrator. The book pays tribute to the cultural expressions of these women and to the manner in which their creativity is transmitted to younger generations
Fernández was a professor in romance languages and part of the core faculty in women's studies at the University of Georgia for seven years. She has also taught at Charles University in the Czech Republic on a Fullbright, Georgia Southern, and the University of Houston. She has also been a senior lecturer at University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Fernández is a fifth-generation Tejana from Laredo, Texas. She earned her B.A. and an M.A. degrees at the University of Texas at Austin and her Ph.D. in romance languages & literatures from the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation, "Towards a Contextualization of José Carlos Mariátegui's Concept of Literary and Cultural Nationalism," examined the role of the Peruvian writer and journalist in the early 20th century Peruvian cultural wars.
Fernandez held a post-doctoral fellowship at the Center for Mexican American Studies at UT Austin. She received a Rockefeller Fellowship from the Womanist Consortium of the Institute of African American Studies at University of Georgia to study Chicana literary feminism and nationalism. She received a second Rockefeller Fellowship from the CRIM (Centro Regional de Investigacion Multidisciplinarias), a research center in Cuernavaca associated with the National University of Mexico.
