Robin Hemley is Director of the George Polk School of Communications as well as Parsons Family Chair in Creative Writing, University Professor and Co-Chair of the MFA in Writing at LIU-Brooklyn, USA. He is also Professor Emeritus at The University of Iowa, USA, and a graduate of The Iowa Writers' Workshop where The Digital Storytelling Lab was recently dedicated in his honor. He is the award-winning author of 16 books of fiction and nonfiction, including most recently the autofiction, Oblivion, An After-Autobiography (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 (2020, Penguin SE Asia, 2021). His new collection of essays is How to Change History: A Salvage Project (2025). 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. 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, and is a graduate of The Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is co-editor with Leila Philip of Speculative Nonfiction.