Robin Hemley

Robin Hemley has published twelve books of fiction and nonfiction. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, three Pushcart Prizes, and the Nelson Algren Award from the Chicago Tribune. His work has been published in such journals and newspapers as The New York Times, New York Magazine, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, The Believer, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Paris Review Daily, Orion, The Wall Street Journal, Lapham’s Quarterly, Conjunctions, The Sun, and many anthologies internationally. Among his books are the popular craft books Turning Life into Fiction and A Field Guide for Immersion Writing, as well as the anthologies Extreme Fiction (with Michael Martone) and I’ll Tell You Mine: Thirty Years of Essays from the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program (with Hope Edelman). Robin is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He directed The University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program for nine years, and is a Professor Emeritus at the UI. He currently directs the Writing Program and is Writer-in-Residence at Yale-NUS College, Singapore, and is also an associate faculty member at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.

Instructor Events

The Frangible Memoir

Weeklong July 22 to July 27 2018

“Frangible” has two meanings: able to be broken up into many parts and bullets that disintegrate upon impact. We’ll be approaching the memoir this week in both senses of the word—looking at memoir and memory in terms of fragmentation, writing brief snippets of memoir in a series of exercises, and creating little explosions on the page, brief bursts that suggest more than they state explicitly. This class is designed for the both poets and prose writers who are drawn less to narrative and more to suggestion and metaphor.