Los Altos Town Crier » Author of ‘Distant Land of My Father’ to speak at LA library endowment event

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Caldwell

Bo Caldwell, a Cupertino author, is scheduled to speak 3:30 p.m. April 6 at the Los Altos main library as part of the fourth annual “Speaking Volumes” series by leading contemporary authors.

Sponsored by the Los Altos Library Endowment (LALE), the presentation will be held in the Program Room of the library, 13 N. San Antonio Road.

Caldwell’s novel, “The Distant Land of My Father,” was published in hardcover by Chronicle Books in October 2001 and in paperback by Harcourt in September 2002. The book was a national best-seller and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2001.

The book tells the story of Anna, who lives with her glamorous parents in Shanghai in the 1930s. Beset by political turmoil, Anna’s mother takes her daughter to America to grow up in safety. Anna’s father remains in China, where he is arrested and tortured until he escapes to the United States. The family is forced to examine their relationships and their love for both China and their adopted country.

Born in Oklahoma City in 1955, Caldwell grew up in Los Angeles and attended Stanford University, where she later held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing and a Jones Lectureship in Creative Writing. She also received a fellowship in literature from the National Endowment for the Arts, an Artist Fellowship from the Arts Council of Santa Clara County, the Georgia Shreve Prize for Fiction at Stanford University and the Joseph Henry Jackson Award from the San Francisco Foundation.

Her personal essays have appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine; The Washington Post Magazine; and America. Her short stories have been included in Story, Ploughshares, Epoch and other literary journals.

LALE is the endowment arm of the Los Altos library, with current assets in excess of $2 million. Last year, LALE was the recipient of a $1.6 million bequest from the estate of Virginia Whipple, longtime member of Friends of the Library. The endowment seeks generous gifts and bequests to perpetuate the financial strength and stability of the library.

For more information, visit www.lalendow.org.