Early life and education

Art advocacy

• Assistant to the Director, Mexican Museum in San Francisco
• Director, Bilingual Arts Program, Oakland Unified School District
• Founder, Prisma: A Multicultural, Multilingual Women's Literary Review (1979—1982) at Mills College
• Directed two major conferences: "The Cultural Roots of Chicana Literature, 1780-1980" (Mills College and Aztlán Cultural, 1981; see here for photo of the exhibit's poster) and "Latinos in the United States: Cultural Roots and Diversity" (Brown University and Casa Puerto Rico, 1985).

Editorial and curatorial work

• Editor, Arte Público Press, from 1990-1994. Several of the women she worked with received national awards for their novels.
• Curator, "Twenty-Five Years of Hispanic Literature of the United States, 1965-1990" (traveling), sponsored by the Texas Humanities Resource Center.

Marriage and children

• Intaglio: A Novel in Six Stories (1990)
• Fronterizas: Una novela en seis cuentos (2001; Spanish translation of Intaglio)
• In Other Words: Literature by Latinas of the United States, ed. (1994; anthology)
• En nuestras palabras: Ficción y poesía de las latinas en los Estados Unidos (forthcoming; anthology)
• Her articles have been published in such articles as Revista de Linguística y Filología de la Universidad de Costa Rica; Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies; and Women’s Studies

• Three-time Lila Wallace resident at the MacDowell Colony
• Multicultural Publisher's Exchange award, Best Fiction (1991), Intaglio: A Novel in Six Stories
• Texas Institute of Letters (1991)
• Fulbright award to the Department of English at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic (2006—2007)

• Gómez-Vega, Ibis. "La mujer como artista en Intaglio." The Bilingual Review/La Revista Bilingue, 1993 Jan-Apr; 18 (1): 14-22.
• Kelley, Margot. "A Minor Revolution: Chicano/a Composite Novels and the Limits of Genre." Ethnicity and the American Short Story. Ed. Julia Brown. New York, NY: Garland; 1997. pp. 63—84.
• Muthyala, John Sumanth. "Roberta Fernández's Intaglio: Border Crossings and Mestiza Feminism in the Borderlands." Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue Canadienne d'Etudes Américaines, 2000; 30 (1): 92-110. ( PDF online)