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Visiting Writers Series to Present
Mong-Lan and Bonnie Jo Campbell

Posted April 8, 2003

HOLLAND -- Two writers with very different backgrounds will share the stage at the final Hope College Visiting Writers Series reading of the 2002-03 season.

Mong-Lan and Bonnie Jo Campbell will read on Tuesday, April 22, at 7 p.m. at the Knickerbocker Theatre, located at 86 E. 8th St. in downtown Holland. The Hope College Jazz Chamber Ensemble will perform before the reading, beginning at 6:30 p.m.

The public is invited to both the reading and the Jazz Chamber Ensemble performances. Admission is free.

Poet, painter, photographer, dancer and self- described "world-class sleeper," Mong-Lan was born in Saigon and immigrated to America at the age of five. Her first book of poems, "Song of the Cicadas," won the 2000 Juniper Prize, and was recently a finalist for the Norma Faber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Mong-Lan is currently a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University.

Campbell grew up on a Michigan farm, where she learned to castrate pigs, milk cows and make chocolate candy. After earning a master's degree in mathematics she turned to writing fiction, and earned an M.F.A. in writing from Western Michigan University. She is the author of the novel "Q Road," and the story collection, "Women and Other Animals." She won the Associated Writing Program award for short fiction, has had work included in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and was chosen a Barnes & Noble Discover author in 2002. "The New York Times" describes her stories as "bitter but sweetened by humor." Campbell lives in Kalamazoo.

Lucy Grealy was originally scheduled to read, but passed away last fall.

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