Bonnie Jo Campbell
“Campbell’s an American voice—two parts healthy fear, one part awe, one part irony, one part realism.”
—Los Angeles Times
BESTSELLING FICTION WRITER
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
Bonnie Jo Campbell is an American Writer living with her husband and donkeys in rural Michigan.
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.” The book was optioned and developed into an award winning feature film directed by Haroula Rose, which debuted in 2020.
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. She is also the author of Women and Other Animals, which won the AWP prize for short fiction; and the collection Mothers, Tell Your Daughters. Her story “The Smallest Man in the World” was awarded a Pushcart Prize and her story “The Inventor, 1972” was awarded the 2009 Eudora Welty Prize from Southern Review. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the Mark Twain Award from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature. Her most recent novel, The Waters, is forthcoming from publishers W. W. Norton in January, 2024.
The Waters
Now A National Bestseller
“A master of rural noir returns with a fierce, mesmerizing novel about exceptional women and the soul of a small town.”
