Bonnie Jo Campbell • Sat, Jan 27, 2024

Bonnie Jo Campbell

Bonnie Jo Campbell is one of our most highly acclaimed authors in Michigan—a national bestseller, a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a Guggenheim fellow award winner.

She is the author of the national bestselling novel Once Upon a River, praised by the New York Times Book Review as “an excellent American parable about the consequences of our favorite ideal, freedom.” The book was made into an award-winning feature film.

Her first novel, Q Road, delves into the lives of a rural community where development pressures brought unwelcome change. And her critically-acclaimed short fiction collection, American Salvage, was finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critic’s Circle Award. The collection tells fourteen rowdy stories of folks struggling to make sense of the twenty-first century. She also wrote Women and Other Animals, which won the AWP prize for short fiction; and the collection Mothers, Tell Your Daughters. Her awards also include a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow. She and her husband live with their pet donkeys outside of Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Guest Host | Anne-Marie Oomen

Anne-Marie Oomen is the recent recipient of The Library of Michigan’s 2023-2024 Michigan Author Award for her lifetime achievements. She has also won AWP’s Sue Willima Silverman Nonfiction Award for As Long as I Know You: The Mom Book; Michigan Notable Book awards for The Lake Michigan Mermaid (with poet, Linda Nemec Foster), Pulling Down the Barn and House of Fields; and a Next Generation Indie Award for her memoir, Love, Sex and 4-H.. Her work also includes An American Map: Essays and a collection of poetry, Uncoded Woman. She edited Elemental, A Collection of Michigan Nonfiction and Looking Over My Shoulder: Reflections on the Twentieth Century. She has written seven plays, including award-winning Northern Belles, inspired by oral histories of women farmers, and Secrets of Luuce Talk Tavern, winner of the CTAM contest. She is a founding editor of Dunes Review, former president of Michigan Writers, and serves as instructor at Solstice MFA in Creative Writing at Lasell University (MA) and at the Interlochen College of Creative Arts. She appears at conferences throughout the country. She and her husband, David Early, built their home on wild acreage near Empire, Michigan, and their beloved Lake Michigan.