Bo Caldwell was born in Oklahoma City in 1955. She 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 has received a fellowship in literature from the National Endowment for the Arts, an Artist Fellowship from the Arts Council of Santa Clara County, and the Joseph Henry Jackson Award from the San Francisco Foundation. Her personal essays have appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, theWashington Post Magazine, and America Magazine, and her short stories have been included in Story, Ploughshares, Epoch, and other literary journals.

Her novel, The Distant Land of My Father, was published in hardcover by Chronicle Books in October of 2001 and in paperback by Harcourt in September of 2002. The book was a national bestseller, one of the Los Angeles Times’ Best Books of 2001, and a Booksense 76 pick in both hardcover and paperback. The book has also been selected for community reading programs in Pasadena (“One City, One Story”), Santa Clara County (“Silicon Valley Reads”), and the City of Claremont (“On the Same Page”). Foreign rights were sold to the U.K., the Netherlands, France, and Italy. She lives in Northern California.