Robin Hemley, director of the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program, will read from Reply All, his new collection of short stories, at 7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 6, in Prairie Lights Books and through a live stream on the Virtual Writing University.

Reply All, the third collection of Hemley’s award-winning and widely anthologized short stories, takes a humorous, edgy, and frank look at the human art of deception and self-deception.

In a short video for the book, Hemley begins, “I was a very good liar as a kid. I think that was one of the best training grounds I had for being a short-story writer.” View the full video here.

Pulitzer Prize-winning UI theater arts alumnus Robert Olen Butler wrote, "Reply All is a thrilling collection: laugh-out-loud funny and achingly sad and deeply in touch with the profound humanity underneath the increasingly bizarre surface of our culture.

“And one of the basic great things about this book is that it brilliantly demonstrates the paradox of art: If you embrace the zeitgeist with compassionate humanity and finely observed detail, you end up writing a book that will endure. Reply All will endure."

Hemley, an alumnus of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on DO-OVER!. He has published seven books, and his stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Chicago Tribune, and many literary magazines and anthologies. He is also the editor of Defunctmagazine.

The Nonfiction Writing Program is part of the English Department in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

For accommodations at the live event, contact jan@prairielights.com.