Join us for our next Visiting Writers Series event with Davy Rothbart, October 17, 6 p.m., Richardson Library Room 115.

Davy Rothbart is the creator of Found Magazine, a frequent contributor to public radio’s This American Life, and the author of a book of personal essays, My Heart Is An Idiot, and a collection of stories, The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas. He writes regularly for GQ Magazine and Grantland, and his work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Believer. His documentary film, Medora, about a resilient high-school basketball team in a dwindling town in rural Indiana, premiered at the SXSW Film Festival, and will be released nationwide in November, 2013. Rothbart is also the founder of Washington II Washington, an annual hiking adventure for inner-city kids.

In My Heart Is an Idiot, Davy Rothbart is looking for love in all the wrong places. Constantly. He falls helplessly in love with pretty much every girl he meets—and rarely is the feeling reciprocated. Time after time, he hops in a car and tears halfway across America with his heart on his sleeve. He’s continually coming up with outrageous schemes and adventures, which he always manages to pull off. Well, almost always. But even when things don’t work out, Rothbart finds meaning and humor in every moment.

Whether it’s confronting a scammer who takes money from aspiring writers, sifting through a murder case that’s left a potentially innocent friend in prison, or waking up naked on a park bench in New York City, nothing and no one is off limits. And it’s all recounted in Davy’s singular, spirited literary voice, “an intriguing hybrid of timeless midwestern warmth and newfangled jive talk,” in the words of Sarah Vowell.

My Heart Is an Idiot has been named a Best Book of the Year by Vanity Fair, Chicago Tribune, The Huffington Post, and NPR.

Read more about Rothbart here.