American Salvage: A Conversation with 2009 National Book Award finalist and author Bonnie Jo Campbell & Lolita Hernandez

Presented by The Author's Forum Saturday, May 15, 2010 5:00 - 6:30 PM Library Gallery, Room 100 Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library 913 S. University Ann Arbor, Michigan Book signing & sale courtesy of Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room.

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The Author's Forum is a collaboration between the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities, University Library, Great Lakes Literary Arts Center, and the Ann Arbor Book Festival.

Contact Information:
Kathy Robenalt
wroben3357@aol.com
734.369.3366

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BACKGROUND: Michigan writer Bonnie Jo Campbell's American Salvage is rich with local color and peopled with rural characters who love and hate extravagantly. They know how to fix cars and washing machines, how to shoot and clean game, and how to cook up methamphetamine, but they have not figured out how to prosper in the twenty-first century. Today, Campbell and Lolita Hernandez discuss work and the inner lives of working-class characters in post-industrial America.

Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of a collection of stories, Women & Other Animals, and a novel, Q Road. American Salvage is a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award. She is the winner of a Pushcart Prize, the AWP Award for Short Fiction, and the Southern Review's 2008 Eudora Welty Prize. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she studies and teaches kobudo, the art of Okinawan weapons, and hangs out with her two donkeys, Jack and Don Quixote.

Photo by John Campbell

Lolita Hernandez teaches creative writing in the University of Michigan Residential College. She is the author of Autopsy of an Engine and Other Stories from the Cadillac Plant, which won a 2005 PEN Beyond Margins Award, and two collections of poems: Quiet Battles and Snakecrossing . She worked for the UAW for over thirty years, twenty-one of them at the Cadillac Plant in Detroit.