"A demonstration of outstanding skills on the river of American literature." —Entertainment Weekly
Bonnie Jo Campbell has created an unforgettable heroine in sixteen-year-old Margo Crane, a beauty whose unflinching gaze and uncanny ability with a rifle have not made her life any easier. After the violent death of her father, Margo takes to the river in search of her mother with only a biography of Annie Oakley to her name. Her river odyssey through rural Michigan becomes a defining journey, one that leads her beyond self-preservation and to deciding what price she is willing to pay for her choices.
Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of six works of fiction, including American Salvage, finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Once Upon a River, a national bestseller. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, AWP’s Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, and a Pushcart Prize, she lives outside Kalamazoo, Michigan, with donkeys.
Bonnie Jo Campbell’s The Waters follows the interwoven and often complicated lives of a family of women inhabiting an island in a Michigan swamp. Campbell joins us to talk about the challenges in crafting this novel, matching her unique characters with an equally intriguing setting, small-town storytelling and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured […]
Is finding a new favorite author on your list of resolutions for 2024? We’re coming up on on 350th episode of our Poured Over podcast later this month (and — wow — our 400th later this year). We’ve hosted Pulitzer Prize winners, Nobel Laureates, Booker Prize winners, National Book Award winners, B&N Book of the […]
