Robin Hemley

Biography

Robin Hemley has published fifteen books of fiction and nonfiction. His most recent books are 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, and 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 Iowa Review, The New York Times, New York Magazine, Chicago Tribune, and many others. He is the founder of the international nonfiction conference NonfictioNOW; was the director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa for nine years; served as inaugural director of the Writers’ Centre at Yale-NUS, Singapore; and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is co-editor with Leila Philip of Speculative Nonfiction (Specualtivenonfiction.org) and co-founder of Authors at Large with Xu Xi (aalauthors.com). His websites are Robinhemley.com and Oblvion.cafe. His forthcoming collection of essays is How to Change History: A Salvage Project (Nebraska, 2025). Subscribe to his Substack at Robinhemley.substack.com. 

Events

Robin Hemley photo

Artifacts: A Week of Writing Prompts

When
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Presenters
Event status
Scheduled
Attendance Required
No
Description
Whether you’re a memoirist, biographer, fiction writer, or poet, objects can be used to unlock language, characters, memories, and your imagination. It’s no secret that objects can hold special meaning beyond their original functions. Open the junk drawer in your kitchen, go through boxes in your...
Robin Hemley photo

Turning Life into Fiction

When
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Presenters
Event status
Scheduled
Attendance Required
No
Description
This course will use as its basis my craft book, Turning Life into Fiction , which has been in print for thirty years (though it’s not necessary to purchase the book). As the title suggests, our week will focus on the transformation process needed to take a real event and turn it into compelling...
Robin Hemley photo