Fiction writer Bonnie Jo Campbell to read for Writing Program Reading Series Oct. 6

Fiction writer Bonnie Jo Campbell will read from her work at 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 6, for the Writing Program Reading Series at Washington University in St. Louis.

The reading is free and open to the public and takes place in Hurst Lounge, located on the second floor of Duncker Hall, in the northwest corner of Brookings Quadrangle, near the intersection of Hoyt and Brookings drives. For more information, call (314) 935-7130.

Campbell is the author the novel Q Road (2002), which was named a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers book, and the short story collection Women & Other Animals (1999), which won the prestigious Associated Writing Programs prize for short fiction. Her story “The Smallest Man in the World” won a Pushcart Prize in 2001. In addition, she co-edited the anthology Our Working Lives: Short Stories of People and Work (with Larry Smith, 2000), and has published a personal newsletter, The Letter Parade, since 1987.

“Bonnie Jo Campbell writes of strong women, women burdened by exceptional beauty, women with simian appetites and aspirations, women so strong they’re at home only in the sideshow atmosphere of a circus, celebratory grotesques all too happy to dismantle the feminine ideal,” said Kellie Wells, assistant professor of English in Arts & Sciences. “And she writes with a hard-bitten, incantatory lyricism so heartfelt, even readers invulnerable to such enchantment can’t help but be charmed by her vision.”

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 has hitchhiked across the United States and Canada; scaled the Swiss Alps on her bicycle; and traveled with the Ringling Bros and Barnum and Bailey Circus selling snow cones. As president of Goulash Tours Inc., she has organized and led adventure tours in Russia, the Baltics and Eastern Europe.

Campbell received her M.F.A. in writing from Western Michigan University in 1998. She lives with her husband and other animals outside Kalamazoo. In her spare time, she created her a microbrew to go with her novel. It’s called Q Brew.