Michigan Salvage is the first scholarly collection on celebrated writer Bonnie Jo Campbell, the author of two novels and three short story collections, including National Book Award finalist American Salvage (2009). Her writing captures a diverse and bustling rural America, brimming with complex characters who struggle with addiction, poverty, and land degradation—issues that have become, undeniably, part of the southwestern Michigan landscape that she calls home. The essays in this volume demonstrate many rich ways to approach Campbell’s writing, from historical and cultural overviews to essays examining the class and gender implications of her stories and novels, to teaching essays highlighting how to use her work in the classroom and beyond. Along with each essay, Michigan Salvage also features lesson plans and writing prompts meant to spark discussion and encourage further investigation into these stories and novels. This essential and teachable collection makes plain Campbell’s contributions to contemporary American literature.

Lisa DuRose is an English faculty member at Inver Hills Community College in Minnesota, where she teaches courses in composition, the novel, and the short story. She has published essays in the Journal of College and Character, The Wallace Stevens Journal, and Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies. Her work on Bonnie Jo Campbell has appeared in Midwestern Miscellany, in Rain Taxi, and with Macmillan Learning. She is currently preparing a biography of Campbell.
 
Ross K. Tangedal is associate professor of English and director of the Cornerstone Press at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, where he specializes in American print and publishing culture. He is the author of The Preface: American Authorship in the Twentieth Century (2021) and coeditor of Editing the Harlem Renaissance (2021). His articles have been published in multiple journals, including The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, South Atlantic Review, TheHemingway Review, The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, Authorship, and MidAmerica, and in numerous essay collections. He serves on the editorial team of the Hemingway Letters Project.
 
Andy Oler is the author of Old-Fashioned Modernism: Rural Masculinity and Midwestern Literature (2019) and the editor of Pieces of the Heartland: Representing Midwestern Places (2018). His writing has appeared in Hyped on Melancholy, The New Territory, Essay Daily, Cleveland Review of Books, College Literature, and Queering the Countryside. He is departments editor at The New Territory, where he edits the online series Literary Landscapes, publishing contributors’ personal stories about sites of Midwestern literature. He is associate professor of humanities at Embry–Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida.