ESCANABA — Escanaba Public Library announces an Author Talk with Michigan Notable Books Author Bonnie Jo Campbell who will present her latest book The Waters, on Wednesday, July 17 at 5:30 p.m. in the library.

Her new book is a “spellbinding and brutal story about an aging herbalist, Hermine “Herself” Zook, and her granddaughter, who live in a cottage on a marshland island in a farming township in rural Michigan. The farmers, like the herbalist, struggle to find balance the modern world, a recurring theme.” (Mom Egg Review, Review by Linda K. Sienkiewicz)

Campbell is also 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.

Campbell grew up on a small Michigan farm with her mother and four siblings in a house hergrandfather 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 U.S. and Canada, scaled the Swiss Alps on her bicycle, and traveled with the Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus

selling snow cones. She lives with her husband and donkeys outside Kalamazoo, Michigan. For more information on the author, visit http://www.bonniejocampbell.net.

There is no registration for this free program, and everyone is welcome. This project is funded in part by Michigan Humanities, an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Michigan Arts and Culture Council and the Friends of the Escanaba Public Library. The Escanaba Public Library is located at 400 Ludington Street in downtown Escanaba. For more information call 906-789-7323 or visit the library’s web site at www.escanabalibrary.org or link to our Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter pages.