Robin Hemley
Robin Hemley has published sixteen books of fiction and nonfiction. His most recent book, a memoir in essays, is How to Change History: A Salvage Project (Nebraska, 2025). Other books include the autofiction, Oblivion, An After-Autobiography (Gold Wake, 2022), The Art and Craft of Asian Stories: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology, co-authored with Xu Xi (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Borderline Citizen: Dispatches from the Outskirts of Nationhood (Nebraska, 2020, Penguin SE Asia, 2021). He has previously published four collections of short stories, and his stories have been widely anthologized. His widely used writing text, Turning Life into Fiction, has sold over a hundred thousand copies and has been in print for nearly thirty years. His work has been published and translated widely and he has received such awards as a Guggenheim Fellowship, a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, three Pushcart Prizes in both nonfiction and fiction, The Nelson Algren Award for Fiction, The Independent Press Book Award for Memoir, among others. His short stories have been featured several times on NPR’s “Selected Shorts” and his essays and short stories have appeared in such journals as Creative Nonfiction, Conjunctions, Guernica, The Believer, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Paris Review, The Sun, New England Review, North American Review, LitHub, The Iowa Review, The New York Times, New York Magazine, Chicago Tribune, and many others. A graduate of The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is the Founder of the international nonfiction conference, NonfictioNOW and was the director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at The University of Iowa for nine years, inaugural director of The Writers’ Centre at Yale-NUS, Singapore. He has delivered readings, workshops, and lectures around the world and is a Professor Emeritus at The University of Iowa. The Digital Storytelling Lab at The University of Iowa was recently dedicated in his honor. He leads writing retreats around the world and offers book coaching and manuscript editing through Authorsatlarge.com. Subscribe to his Substack at Robinhemley.substack.com.