Posted on behalf of Marian University and Thelma Sadoff Center of the Arts in Fond du Lac:
The Lake Reading Series / Bonnie Jo Campbell /
In partnership with Marian University, Thelma Sadoff Center of the Arts will bring award-winning and acclaimed author Bonnie Jo Campbell to Fond du Lac to share her work, meet with community members and writing students, and speak to the power of narrative and the gravity & dignity of small-town rural lives.
In addition to the evening reading as part of the Lake Reading Series, Campbell will visit a class at Marian where students are reading her novel Once Upon a River, and enjoy a casual dinner with community members.
To support Bonnie Jo Campbell’s visit, Thelma is developing partnerships with community organizations, writing associations around the state, as well as applying for supporting funds from arts and humanities organizations.
Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of the National Bestselling novel Once Upon a River (Norton, 2011), a river odyssey with an unforgettable sixteen-year-old heroine, which the New York Times Book Review calls “an excellent American parable about the consequences of our favorite ideal, freedom.” Her first novel, Q Road, delves into the lives of a rural community where development pressures are bringing unwelcome change in the character of the land.
Campbell’s critically-acclaimed short fiction collection American Salvage (Wayne State University Press, 2009) was finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critic’s Circle Award. The collection consists of fourteen lush and rowdy stories of folks who are struggling to make sense of the twenty-first century. Donna Seaman wrote, “Campbell’s busted-broke, damaged, and discarded people are rich in longing, valor, forgiveness, and love, and readers themselves will feel salvaged and transformed by this gutsy book’s fierce compassion.” Her newest book of stories is Mothers, Tell Your Daughters.
Bonnie Jo Campbell grew up on a small Michigan farm with her mother and four siblings in a house her grandfather Herlihy built in the shape of an H. She learned to castrate small pigs, milk Jersey cows, and, when she was snowed in with chocolate, butter, and vanilla, to make remarkable chocolate candy. When she left home for the University of Chicago to study philosophy, her mother rented out her room. She has since hitchhiked across the US 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.