biography

"I loved everything about being a newspaper journalist in Pennsylvania because every day on the job presented a new set of challenges."

Robin Acton received more than a hundred awards from state and regional professional journalism organizations for her work in investigative projects, general news, features, business, health, and education writing. She has written extensively about crime, politics, government bureaucracy, terrorism, and both man-made and natural disasters She was named News Writer of the Year in 2001 and 2008 by the Pennsylvania Women’s Press Association. In 1995, she received the prestigious Public Service Award from the Pennsylvania Newspaper Publishers Association Foundation for an investigative series on the courts that ended with a president judge’s removal from the bench. She has five Golden Quill Awards and more than a dozen additional Golden Quill nominations from the Press Club of Western Pennsylvania. She received four Matrix awards from the Association for Women in Communications in Pennsylvania, as well as numerous honors in the Pennsylvania Keystone Press Association, the Society for Professional Journalists and the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors competitions.
Her debut novel, The Taker, garnered a 2025 International Impact Book Award in the Mystery/Thriller category and was a finalist for the 2022 Silver Falchion Award in the Mystery category in the annual competition sponsored by the Killer Nashville International Writers' Conference.
Acton is a member of the International Thriller Writers. She is represented by WordLink, Inc., and is under contract with Amphorae Publishing Group.
A wanderer at heart, Acton loves to travel, and has thus far visited forty-two states and fifty countries, with the rest of the world on her bucket list. She and her husband share a blended family that includes a daughter, three sons, five grandchildren, and a very spoiled dog, Louie.

Career

Acton spent twenty years at the Herald-Standard in Uniontown, PA, where she covered general news assignments prior to specializing in criminal court coverage. In 1997, she joined the investigative reporting team at the Tribune-Review in nearby Greensburg. Seven years later, she was named the paper’s projects editor, a position that included editing investigative and special projects and coordinating coverage of major news events such as the September 11, 2001, crash of Flight 93. In 2006, she was named the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review’s regional writer and spent the remaining four years of her career covering prestigious assignments around the U.S.

biography

Career

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