Prairie Lights Bookstore

Please join us for a reading and conversation with Robin Hemley to celebrate the release of his book Oblivion. He will be joined in conversation by Patricia Foster and David Hamilton.

Connie May Fowler, author of How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly, says of the book, “A tour de force. Oblivion is a marvel of the imagination and intellect. Hemley has . . .created a book that is a relentless page turner: funny and wise, exuberant and sad, insightful and magical, and-most wonderful of all-deeply, deeply human.”

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 25 years. 

David Hamilton was a member of the English Department at the University of Iowa for thirty-seven years, teaching both literature and writing courses. Through most of those years, too, he edited The Iowa Review. He is the author of A Certain Arc: Essays of Finding My Way,  Deep River: A Memoir of a Missouri Farm, and Ossabaw and The Least Hinge, a volume and chapbook of poems.

Patricia Foster is the author of All the Lost Girls,  Just Beneath My Skin, Girl from Soldier Creek and the editor of four anthologies including Understanding the Essay (co-edited with Jeff Porter). She is the recipient of a Dean’s Scholar Award, a Yaddo Fellowship, a Florida Arts Council Award, an Iowa Arts & Humanities Award, and has published over fifty essays and stories in  Ploughshares, The Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review and other quarterlies.  She is professor emeritus of the MFA Program in Nonfiction at UIowa and has taught in France, Australia, Italy, Czech Republic, and Spain.