Writer · Brooklyn, New York
The Author
“You can’t judge a man’s life until his last day has passed. Perhaps it is the same with every experience — it did not go your way, yes? But how can you know whether it was right or wrong without the wider context of life?”
Robert Aldana was born and raised on Long Island. He studied English Literature at Columbia University, graduating in 2017, before earning his MFA in Fiction from Brooklyn College, where he was a recipient of the prestigious Tow International Research Stipend.
His debut novel, The Needlestack, draws on Aldana’s firsthand experiences — the back-office years at a New York bank, the year teaching English in rural Spain, the community of artists and cooks and dreamers who populate Brooklyn — to create fiction of uncommon intimacy and scope.
Formation
Brooklyn College — CUNY
Graduate program in creative writing. Recipient of the Tow International Research Stipend, awarded to outstanding students whose work engages with international subjects and perspectives.
Columbia University
Rigorous grounding in close reading, literary history, and the tradition of the novel.
Tow International Research Stipend
Competitive grant awarded to MFA students whose writing demonstrates serious international scope, funded research, and literary promise. Applied toward the development of The Needlestack.
Spain — Auxiliares de Conversación
One academic year teaching English in Aragón, Spain, under the Spanish Ministry of Education’s official placement program. The experience forms the moral and narrative core of Part Two of The Needlestack.
Biography
Robert Aldana grew up in a Long Island suburb — the son of a Cuban-American father and an Italian-American mother, both the first in their families to attend college. The weight of that fact, and the freedom it created, is everywhere in his work. He attended Columbia University, studying English Literature and discovering that he wanted to be a writer.
After graduating in 2017, he spent a year navigating the contradiction of working in finance while writing fiction — a contradiction that eventually became the subject of his debut novel.
He enrolled in the MFA program at Brooklyn College, where he studied under acclaimed fiction writers and was awarded the Tow International Research Stipend. The novel was written during his time in the MFA program, revised in Brooklyn, and completed in the spring of 2026.
Alongside the novel, Aldana is completing a collection of short stories whose settings span the Alps, Florida, pre-war France, and contemporary New York. His literary sensibility is shaped by Tolstoy, Ferrante, Hemingway, Kundera, and — perhaps unexpectedly — P.G. Wodehouse, whose fiction is funny because it is precise.
He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
At a Glance
Brooklyn, New York
Current residence
Columbia University, 2017
BA, English Literature
Brooklyn College MFA
MFA in Fiction
Tow International Research Stipend
Brooklyn College award
Aragón, Spain
Year abroad, English educator
Current Projects
The Needlestack
Debut novel — seeking representation
Life as Art
Short Story Collection — In progress
Literary Influences
Leo Tolstoy
Ben Lerner
Milan Kundera
Elena Ferrante
Chinua Achebe
Artistic Statement
“I write about people who, like myself, are trying in their own imperfect and comical ways to live with intention. Romantics, fools, dreamers…Often, these are people from my own life, which makes the work feel intimate to me, but I try to treat their concerns with a universality legible to all.”
— Robert Aldana
The characters in The Needlestack — a cook who dreams of running his own restaurant, a playwright navigating a marriage she has outgrown, a Frenchman haunted by class aspiration, a writer who has not yet become one — are each trying, in their fashion, to find the right problem to solve. The novel proposes that this search, conducted honestly, is the proper business of a life.
Get in Touch
Robert welcomes all serious inquiries regarding literary representation, press and media, and foreign rights.
