Robert (Scotty) Scotellaro was born and raised on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He has worked a variety of jobs, from being a riveter, to creating advertising layouts for Barnes & Noble. Robert subsequently served in Vietnam as a combat medic, and then as a Ward Master in a makeshift emergency medical unit.

Returning home, he became a founding member of Earth People’s Park in Greenwich Village—a vast community outreach facility. Highlights from that period were playing bongos onstage while Allen Ginsberg recited his poetry, and hitting the jazz clubs and hangouts with Reggie Lucas (who would go on to produce Madonna’s first album and play for five years with Miles Davis).

In 1970 he relocated to San Francisco and started a family. There, he published his work in a variety of literary journals, as well as five issues of Rolling Stone. He became actively involved in the S.F. Underground Comix scene (a convergence of counterculture artists from around the country) which included such luminaries as Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman. He published over half a dozen books and pamphlets illustrated by underground artists/friends during that time. Later, he became the editor and publisher of a small poetry chapbook series, and would go on to co-edit One Sentence Poems (online) with Dale Wisely.

Robert is the author of 7 flash fiction collections including most recently: Ways to Read the World (Scantic Books, 2022) and God in a Can (Bamboo Dart Press, 2022), as well as 5 collections of poetry, and several books for children. He has, along with James Thomas, co-edited New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction, published by W.W. Norton & Co.  His work has appeared widely, nationally and internationally, and is included in the W. W. Norton anthologies, Flash Fiction International (2015) and Flash Fiction America (2023), and in 4 Best Small Fictions and 2 Best Microfiction award anthologies.  He is the winner of Zone 3’s Rainmaker Prize in Poetry and the Blue Light Book Award for his fiction. Robert is one of the founding donors to The Ransom Flash Fiction Collection at the University of Texas, Austin. He currently lives in San Francisco with his wife, artist and art historian, Diana Scott.