Bonnie Jo 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 learned to castrate small pigs, milk Jersey cows, and make remarkable chocolate candy. 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 and Bailey Circus selling snow cones. As president of Goulash Tours Inc., she has organized and led adventure tours in Russia and the Baltics, and all the way south to Romania and Bulgaria.

After earning a master’s degree in mathematics in 1992 she started writing fiction. Her collection Women & Other Animals won the prestigious Associated Writing Programs prize for short fiction; her story “The Smallest Man in the World” has been awarded a Pushcart Prize. For fifteen years she has put together a personal newsletter The Letter Parade which was written up in the Village Voice.