This past Friday, Jane and I traveled to Iowa City to particpate in the Mission Creek Festival Lit Crawl. It was a great event. I read with some amazing writers: Eleni Sikelianos, Sarah Fox, Chris Martin, Hugh Ferrer, Mary Austin Speaker, Blair Braverman, and John Colburn. I was actually so nervous, I thought I might die. Seriously. While I was reading, I was imagining keeling over, an ambulance coming to extract me from the place. All in all, though: it went okay.

Before Jane and I left for Iowa City, we found out that TELL EVERYONE I SAID HI had been named to the longlist the the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, which was awesome.

Everything that's happened since my book came out, it just makes me feel so lucky.

A couple other things coming up this week:

This Thursday, I'll be reading with my label-mate, Marie-Helene Bertino at Prairie Lights in Iowa City. I think I mentioned before on this website: I'll write more about Prairie Lights later; I anticipate it being pretty emotional.

This Sunday: My buddy Eugene Cross, author of Fires of Our Choosing, invited me to talk to his students at Columbia College. He taught my book there in a class on writing and publishing, and I'm excited to go and hang out with a bunch of undergrads who've been assigned to read Tell Everyone I Said Hi. On Sunday, though, before my visit to his class, I'm going to visit The BookMarket in Glenview, where I'll read, and answer some questions about how my book came into existence, etc. I'm looking forward to it. And I'm hoping that some of you all, if you're near Iowa City or Chicago, will come out and introduce yourselves in the upcoming week. Please. I mean it.