With just one glance you will see a history instructor; do a double-take and you may catch a mother of three; sit down and talk with her and you will invest one of the most interesting hours of your life in a woman smiling ear-to-ear with glee over the release of her first novel.
This is the undercover life of SRJC instructor Alice Roberti, a strong, dedicated woman with a passion for writing and a knack for carrying a contagious mixture of pure delight and enthusiasm about life.
The contagion has surged through three generations of Roberti women, leaving her with the curiosity and thrill- seeking attitude she exudes. Writing and now releasing work of her own mind and experiences is still surreal to Roberti, but she keeps grounded by teaching history classes and indulging her love of travel.
Roberti has been teaching at SRJC for seven years and her background is well rounded in history.
Her master’s degree is in U.S. history with a specialty in the 19th Century. She has taught history at the University of Maryland and in Egypt, Portugal and England. At SRJC she teaches U.S. history, women’s history and world history.
Roberti says the happiest day she has had as a professor at the SRJC was the day she was hired. “It just seemed to come full circle, having been a student here and then being hired as a professor,” she said.
Roberti hopes her students take a love of history from her classes “but some people just really don’t have that. Hopefully, they take away an interest in furthering their knowledge of history and I hope that I teach with enough enthusiasm that it sort of jump-starts their interest,” she said.
Maile Lilinoe, a third-year SRJC student, has taken three of Roberti’s classes in her first three semesters while interning for two of Roberti’s classes. She didn’t plan on the extra classes but loved the first class she took with Roberti. Lilinoe praised Roberti’s engaging methods of teaching. “Honestly, I just enjoyed listening to Alice speak. She made history interesting and relatable to everyone and always has interesting jokes.”
There is no doubt in Lilinoe’s mind Roberti made an impact in her classes and would advise students to remember Roberti’s name for future history courses.
“I would recommend Alice as an instructor because she genuinely cares about all of her students and wants them to succeed. I can honestly say she’s the most informed instructor that I’ve had for any subject. She teaches in a way that is always entertaining and where important information doesn’t go in one ear and out the other. I have not had a bad experience in a single one of her classes,” Lilinoe said.
When she is not busy teaching, Roberti returns to traveling. She’s spent time in Thailand and Europe and lived in Egypt for two years. By encountering world cultures, Roberti has learned valuable life lessons from her experience and is a proud mother of children following in her footsteps.
“I think the most important thing that I’ve learned from everywhere is to spend time with, and listen to, and hear the stories of the people of that country. That, to me, is the most important. It certainly made us world citizens; we view ourselves in our family because we raised our kids in most of their lives outside of the United States, and all three of our children view themselves as world citizens,” Roberti said.
Though being a world traveler would seem reason enough to celebrate, the release of her first novel, “Nevermore,” available on Amazon’s Kindle, is the bigger reason behind Roberti’s smile.
She started writing the novel in 2009 as a celebration of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allen Poe and completed it in 2010. She started to figure out how to get published. “It was a very slow and tedious process. Then the Arab Spring happened and the revolution broke out so I stopped sending my novel out,” she said. “I tore out about 125 pages, the last part of my novel, and added in all the stuff that happened with the revolution because I was so affected by the revolution happening. After all these years living with this and for it to actually be done and out there is a bit disconcerting, but very exciting. It’s been a real roller-coaster the last couple of days.”
Roberti’s students are some of her most enthusiastic “Nevermore” supporters. “The people in the novel are between 23 -30, so it actually is the age of a lot of my students. I’ve given it to several students as early readers and they loved it. They’ve been really enthusiastic, but I actually kind of wrote it for women my own age [laughing],” she said. “That was my target audience and I have tested it with several reading groups and book clubs. I have tested it from the oldest person who has read it is my mother-in-law and she’s 86, and the youngest person is my daughter, but I do see a gender issue with it; that may be because it’s a strong female character and everything centered around the character, but it seems as if the males who are the most keen on it are the ones who really love mysteries,” she said.
Roberti becomes a storyteller of her own life experiences, basing many of the scenes and characters on people she knows and places she has traveled to.
“I created this series with a very strong female character as the main person in the series, so this is book one that I just had out on Amazon now. I’m writing book two and I have ideas for about nine books in this series where this female character, Meg Ravenhill, will go to different places all over the world and have adventures,” Roberti said.
“Nevermore” takes place in Cairo, during the recent revolution and follows a woman who is an English teacher. She teaches at a high school in Cairo that’s based upon school Roberti’s children attended when they lived in Cairo. Ravenhill is involved in a series of murders, each one mimicking a different Edgar Allen Poe story and her specialty area is Poe, Roberti said.
In writing this novel, Roberti also hopes to break down the walls of stereotypical female characters that are usually portrayed in stories.
“I’m trying to prove that a woman can write a strong female character in a mystery novel who is not severely damaged. There’s a lot of mystery novels out there where the main female character has been abused and can’t connect with other people and I really started with the idea that I was going to have a person who had relationships and a whole life and a family and who wasn’t severely damaged and away from the mainstream people,” she said.