Bonnie Jo Campbell biography

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Bonnie Jo Campbell
Photo: John Campbell

Bonnie Jo Campbell

Bonnie Jo Campbell Biography

Bonnie Jo Campbell grew up on a small Michigan farm. She left home for the University of Chicago to study philosophy. She has since hitchhiked across the U.S. and Canada, scaled the Swiss alps on her bicycle, and traveled with the Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus selling snow cones. As president of Goulash Tours Inc., she has organized and led adventure tours in Russia and the Baltics, and all the way south to Romania and Bulgaria.

Her collection Women and Other Animals details the lives of extraordinary females in rural and small town Michigan, and it won the AWP prize for short fiction; her story "The Smallest Man in the World" has been awarded a Pushcart Prize. Her novel Q Road investigates the lives of a rural community where development pressures are bringing unwelcome change in the character of the land. Her critically-acclaimed short fiction collection American Salvage, which consists of fourteen lush and rowdy stories of folks who are struggling to make sense of the twenty-first century, was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award in Fiction.

For decades, Campbell has put together a personal newsletter - The Letter Parade - and she currently practices Koburyu kobudo weapons training. She has received her M.A. in mathematics and her M.F.A. in writing from Western Michigan University. She now lives with her husband and other animals outside Kalamazoo, and she teaches writing in the low residency program at Pacific University.

Bonnie Jo Campbell's website

This bio was last updated on 10/26/2016. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.

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Books by this Author

Books by Bonnie Jo Campbell at BookBrowse
The Waters jacket Mothers, Tell Your Daughters jacket Once Upon a River jacket
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Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Bonnie Jo Campbell but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose read-alikes

  • Jane Hamilton

    Jane Hamilton

    Jane Hamilton lives, works, and writes in an orchard farmhouse in Rochester, Wisconsin. She is the author of five novels. Her first novel, The Book of Ruth, won the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award for best first novel and was a ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    Once Upon a River

    Try:
    The Book of Ruth
    by Jane Hamilton

  • Jarrett J. Krosoczka

    Jarrett J. Krosoczka

    Jarrett J. Krosoczka is a New York Times bestselling author, a two-time winner of the Children's Choice Book Award for the Third to Fourth Grade Book of the Year, an Eisner award nominee, and the author and/or illustrator of ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    Once Upon a River

    Try:
    Hey, Kiddo
    by Jarrett J. Krosoczka

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