Robert Boswell is the author of eleven books, including The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, a story collection recently chosen by Oprah for her summer reading list, "25 Books You Can't Put Down." He is the author of the novels Century's Son, American Owned Love, Mystery Ride, The Geography of Desire, and Crooked Hearts; the story collections Living to Be 100 and Dancing in the Movies; and the nonfiction books The Half-Known World, a book on the craft of writing, and What Men Call Treasure: The Search for Gold at Victorio Peak, a book about a real- life treasure hunt in New Mexico (co-written with David Schweidel). His cyberpunk novel Virtual Death (published under the pseudonym Shale Aaron) was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. His play Tongues won the John Gassner Prize. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Iowa School of Letters Award for Fiction, the PEN West Award for Fiction, and the Evil Companions Award. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, Best Stories from the South, Esquire, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, Colorado Review, and many other magazines. He shares the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston with his wife, Antonya Nelson.

The Janey Lack Readings in Fiction and Poetry are curated by students in the MFA Program in Creative Writing, and are sponsored by Janey Lack.