About CC

It began with a dream.

In the middle of the night, CC Robinson witnessed an ethnic civil war tear America apart, leaving the nation in ruins. She awoke sobbing, praying — and then, miraculously, fell back asleep. She re-entered the dream and saw America 45 years later, fractured into a new nation called the Federated Republic of America. There she met four young protagonists, and one of them, Marcos, begged her to free them. To write their story. She did. The result is the award-winning Divided series.

Robinson is not your typical dystopian author. A medical doctor who spent years working in post-civil war nations, including over a decade of work connected to Sierra Leone, a country that endured more than three decades of civil conflict, she has seen firsthand what happens when societies fracture along ethnic lines. One story has never left her: two men from neighboring villages who ended up on opposite sides of the war. One massacred the other’s family. Years later, in a post-war reconciliation program, the perpetrator asked for forgiveness and received it. The two men went on to build a tailoring business together. That story lives in the bones of the Divided series.

Back home in Cincinnati, Robinson serves as Associate Pastor at a multi-ethnic congregation led by an African-American pastor, a community that has taught her that racial reconciliation is not a theory but a daily practice. Cincinnati, with its history of race riots and neighborhoods divided along invisible lines, became the setting for Divided. When Robinson and her husband moved there in 2013, her heart broke for how divided her city was. Her heart-level prayer for racial reconciliation, inside and outside the church walls, became the beating heart of the series.

She chose young adult dystopian fiction deliberately. Her four protagonists are all eighteen years old: normal kids — except for Rose, a genius in physics and math — who face an impossible problem and refuse to back down. Each must dig deep, confront the lies they believe about themselves and others, and learn to trust one another across their differences. They are the catalyst for change in a broken nation. Robinson wrote them for young readers because she believes this generation has something her own, Gen X, raised on Live Aid and Benetton ads and dreaming of a collaborative world, has struggled to hold onto: the ability to thread the middle line between nationalism and globalism and find a way forward together.

The Divided series does not flinch from darkness. But it ends on a bright note. By the final book, Robinson’s four heroes have fought both their internal battles and their external enemies to bring their nation its first real hope in 45 years. That hope is the point. Robinson wants young readers to finish the last page feeling empowered, as if their choices today genuinely matter, just as her characters’ choices do. Because she believes they do.

While Robinson’s faith quietly informs her writing, the series is not overtly Christian. Parents and educators can expect Hunger Games-level violence and serious political and relational tension, but no cursing (only a collection of invented expletives that were genuinely fun to develop) and no sexual content beyond kissing. Suitable for readers twelve and up.

When she’s not rescuing her characters from dystopian chaos, CC Robinson is hiking, dancing, or off-roading through the woods with her husband and three Gen Z kids.