Sam Roberts is an avid runner, writer, attorney, and most certainly not the smartest person alive.
A nerdy kid from the projects, Sam grew up on a steady diet of Marvel comics, Star Trek, and hip-hop—three influences that sparked an enduring fascination with impossible ideas, complicated characters, and words that can mean more than one thing at the same time. He has a particular appreciation for the layered bars of hip-hop, where a single line can carry a double, triple, or even quadruple entendre. That love of wordplay, hidden meanings, and ideas tucked inside other ideas eventually found its way into his fiction.
A graduate of Temple University’s Beasley School of Law, Sam has spent his career as a corporate attorney wrestling with complicated problems where the obvious answer is rarely the complete one. But writing The Smartest Person Alive represents something more personal. Part of him still remembers being a kid in public housing with a comic book in his hands, using the stories inside to help teach himself to read. That he would eventually build a legal career—and put enough words of his own together to fill a novel—is something he doesn't take for granted.
In that sense, The Smartest Person Alive is a full-circle moment: a chance to bring together the science fiction he grew up loving, his fascination with language and layered meaning, and his belief that even the biggest ideas matter most when they tell us something about being human.
When Sam isn't practicing law or writing, he can usually be found logging miles on the road, mentoring aspiring law students, serving his community, and amplifying voices of the underestimated, overlooked and those pushed to the margins of society.