Bonnie Jo Campbell

From the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist—an odyssey of a novel about a girl's search for love and identity. Michigan author Bonnie Jo Campbell has created an unforgettable heroine in sixteen-year-old Margo Crane, a beauty whose unflinching gaze and uncanny ability ... (more)with a rifle have not made her life any easier. After the violent death of her father, in which she is complicit, Margo takes to the Stark River in her boat, with only a few supplies and a biography of Annie Oakley, in search of her vanished mother. But the river, Margo's childhood paradise, is a dangerous place for a young woman traveling alone, and she must be strong to survive, using her knowledge of the natural world and her ability to look unsparingly into the hearts of those around her. Her river odyssey through rural Michigan becomes a defining journey, one that leads her beyond self-preservation and to the decision of what price she is willing to pay for her choices.

Bonnie Jo Campbell will read from her new novel, ONCE UPON A RIVER, which takes place in West Michigan with the unforgettable sixteen-year-old heroine, Margo Crane. Campbell is a National Book Award finalist. She will sign books after her presentation.

Bonnie Jo Campbell will read a selection from American Salvage and discuss the writing, editing and publishing of this award-winning, Michigan-centered book. She will share the knowledge that she has gained throughout her writing career, as well as the joys and uncertainties of the writing life. She ... (more)will answer questions honestly and generously, and she’ll help you with strategies for staying inspired as a writer. This program is a part of GR Reads, summer reading for adults. For a full list of books and events, please visit www.grpl.org/GRReads.

Bonnie Jo Campbell’s energy and biting wit make her work both brutal and laugh out-loud funny. All is weird, immediate and raw in Campbell’s stories and poems. Bonnie Jo Campbell’s new story collection, American Salvage, was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award. She is also the author of ... (more)the novel Q Road, and the story collection Women & Other Animals. She has won the AWP award for short fiction, the 2008 Eudora Welty fiction prize, and a Pushcart prize, and she was named a Barnes & Noble Great New Writer. The New York Times has called her stories “Bitter but sweetened by humor,” and Publisher’s Weekly said Campbell details, “domestic worlds where Martha Stewart would fear to tread.” Presented in partnership with Pacific University's Master of Fine Arts in Writing program. In the US Bank Room

American Salvage New from award-winning Michigan writer Bonnie Jo Campbell (Women & Other Animals, Q Road) American Salvage is rich with local color and peopled with rural characters who love and hate extravagantly. They know how to fix cars and washing machines, how to shoot and clean game, and ... (more)how to cook up methamphetamines, but they have not figured out how to prosper in the twenty-first century. Though her characters are vulnerable, confused, and sometimes angry, they are also resolute. Campbell follows them as they rebuild their lives, and continue to hope, dream, and love in the face of loneliness.