Robert Marshall

In 2017, Marshall organized Writers Resist Trump, a large-scale lobbying effort and demonstration that accompanied the AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) Conference in Washington D.C. Marshall told Publisher's Weekly: "I looked and didn't see anything about people going to congress, and I thought that was a little weird." He then began talking to like-minded friends and started a Facebook group to plan and gather participants.

Soon after, Marshall began work on a comprehensive biography of Castaneda. His pursuit of this story led to a confrontation with law enforcement officials in Death Valley in 2014. In 2016, the Biographers International Organization awarded Marshall the Hazel Rowley Prize for this biography-in- progress.

His fiction, poetry, and nonfiction have appeared in Salon, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Event, Blue Lake Review, Ducts, Stickman Review, Public Books, Alembic, Crack the Spine, Blithe House Quarterly, Foliate Oak, and numerous other publications including the anthologies Queer 13 and Afterwords. In 2007, his investigative feature, The Dark Legacy of Carlos Castaneda, revealed the story of the secretive cult started by the controversial anthropologist, and told the story of the five women who disappeared following his death in 1998. It was chosen for Best of Salon 2007.

Robert Marshall is an American writer, artist and critic. As a visual artist, he has exhibited widely in Europe and the United States. Marshall's first novel, A Separate Reality, was published in 2006 by Carrol & Graf and was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award for Debut Fiction. He is currently at work on a biography of Carlos Castaneda.

He is a recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Corporation of Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Performing Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, the Banff Centre and the New York Foundation for the Arts. From 2002 to 2005, Marshall served as director of Prose in General, a reading series at Art in General focusing on the intersection of fiction and the visual arts. In 2004, he started teaching at the International Center of Photography in New York City. He is currently the director of the Pretext Reading Series at Studio 10 Gallery in Brooklyn, where his exhibition "Passing Through" opened in November, 2017. In his review for Hyperallergic, Stephen Maine said "Commonplace yet unsettling, Robert Marshall's dreamlike images are derived from fleeting, fragmentary glimpses of the passing land- and cityscape, seen through the window of a moving car or train. The territory is not as familiar as it sounds. Marshall's contribution to on-the-road photography is unique, and transcends both the genre and the medium."

Robert Marshall earned a BA in 1982 from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. He also attended the Rhode Island School of Design. He was a member of the activist group ACT UP in the 1990s.