Barbara Kingsolver was born on April 8, 1955. She grew up "in the middle of an alfalfa field," in the
part of eastern Kentucky that lies between the opulent horse farms and the impoverished coal fields. While her
family has deep roots in the region, she never imagined staying there herself. "The options were limited--grow
up to be a farmer or a farmer's wife."
Kingsolver has always been a storyteller: "I used to beg my mother to let me tell her a bedtime story."
As a child, she wrote stories and essays and, beginning at the age of eight, kept a journal religiously. Still,
it never occurred to Kingsolver that she could become a professional writer. Growing up in a rural place, where
work centered mainly on survival, writing didn't seem to be a practical career choice. Besides, the writers she
read, she once explained, "were mostly old, dead men. It was inconceivable that I might grow up to be one
of those myself . . . "
Kingsolver left Kentucky to attend DePauw University in Indiana, where she majored in biology. She also took
one creative writing course, and became active in the last anti-Vietnam War protests. After graduating in 1977,
Kingsolver lived and worked in widely scattered places. In the early eighties, she pursued graduate studies in
biology and ecology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she received a Masters of Science degree. She
also enrolled in a writing class taught by author Francine Prose, whose work Kingsolver admires.
Kingsolver's fiction is rich with the language and imagery of her native Kentucky. But when she first left home,
she says, "I lost my accent . . . [P]eople made terrible fun of me for the way I used to talk, so I gave it
up slowly and became something else." During her years in school and two years spent living in Greece and
France she supported herself in a variety of jobs: as an archaeologist, copy editor, X-ray technician, housecleaner,
biological researcher and translator of medical documents. After graduate school, a position as a science writer
for the University of Arizona soon led her into feature writing for journals and newspapers. Her numerous articles
have appeared in a variety of publications, including The Nation, The New York Times, and Smithsonian,
and many of them are included in the collection, High
Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never. In 1986 she won an Arizona Press Club award for outstanding feature
writing, and in 1995, after the publication of High Tide in Tucson, Kingsolver was awarded an Honorary Doctorate
of Letters from her alma mater, De Pauw University.
Kingsolver credits her careers in scientific writing and journalism with instilling in her a writer's discipline
and broadening her "fictional possiblities." Describing herself as a shy person who would generally prefer
to stay at home with her computer, she explains that "journalism forces me to meet and talk with people I
would never run across otherwise."
From 1985 through 1987, Kingsolver was a freelance journalist by day, but she was writing fiction by night.
Married to a chemist in 1985, she suffered from insomnia after becoming pregnant the following year. Instead of
following her doctor's recommendation to scrub the bathroom tiles with a toothbrush, Kingsolver sat in a closet
and began to write The Bean Trees, a novel about
a young woman who leaves rural Kentucky (accent intact) and finds herself living in urban Tucson.
The Bean Trees, published by HarperCollins in 1988, and reissued in a special ten-year anniversary hardcover
edition in 1998, was enthusiastically received by critics. But, perhaps more important to Kingsolver, the novel
was read with delight and, even, passion by ordinary readers. "A novel can educate to some extent," she
told Publishers Weekly. "But first, a novel has to entertain--that's the contract with the reader:
you give me ten hours and I'll give you a reason to turn every page. I have a commitment to accessiblity. I believe
in plot. I want an English professor to understand the symbolism while at the same time I want the people I grew
up with--who may not often read anything but the Sears catalogue--to read my books."
For Kingsolver, writing is a form of political activism. When she was in her twenties she discovered Doris Lessing.
"I read the Children of Violence novels and began to understand how a person could write about the problems
of the world in a compelling and beautiful way. And it seemed to me that was the most important thing I could ever
do, if I could ever do that."
The Bean Trees was followed by the collection, Homeland
and Other Stories (1989), the novels Animal Dreams
(1990), and Pigs in Heaven (1993), and the bestselling
High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now and Never
(1995). Kingsolver has also published a collection of poetry, Another
America: Otra America (Seal Press, 1992, 1998), and a nonfiction book, Holding the Line: Women in the
Great Arizona Mine Strike of l983 (ILR Press/Cornell University Press, 1989, 1996). Her most recent work is
The Poisonwood Bible, a story of the wife and
four daughters of a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959.
A tale of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction, over the course of three decades in post-colonial
Africa, The Poisonwood Bible is set against one of history's most dramatic political parables. It is a compelling
exploration of religion, conscience, imperialist arrogance and the many paths to redemption�and Barbara Kingsolver's
most ambitious work ever.
Barbara Kingsolver presently lives outside of Tucson with her husband Steven Hopp, and her two daughters, Camille
from a previous marriage, and Lily, who was born in 1996. When not writing or spending time with her family, Barbara
gardens, cooks, hikes, works as an environmental activist and human-rights advocate, and plays hand drums and keyboards
with her husband, guitarist, Steven Hopp.
Given that Barbara Kingsolver's work covers the psychic and geographical territories that she knows firsthand,
readers often assume that her work is autobiographical. "There are little things that people who know me might
recognize in my novels," she acknowledges. "But my work is not about me. I don't ever write about real
people. That would be stealing, first of all. And second of all, art is supposed to be better than that. If you
want a slice of life, look out the window. An artist has to look out that window, isolate one or two suggestive
things, and embroider them together with poetry and fabrication, to create a revelation. If we can't, as artists,
improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread."
Review
"Extraordiarily fine . . . Kingsolver has a Chekhovian tenderness toward her characters . . . The title
story is pure poetry."
-- Russell Banks, New York Times Book Review
"A dazzling array of short stories . . . Kingsolver's knowledge of human nature, and especially domestic
relationships, is breathtaking."
-- Publishers Weekly
"Read Homeland and Other Stories and you will feel glad to be alive. You are delighted by a gifted storyteller.
You are strengthened and healed by the toughness and tenderness she discerns in humanity's daily rounds."
-- Newsday
"Kings olver is an extraordinary storyteller."
-- Chicago Tribune
"Kingsolv er's humanity sounds the clearest note.telling us about characters in the middle of their days,
who live as we really do, from one small incident of awareness to the next."
-- Los Angeles Times
"Delightful ."
-- New York Woman
"Kingsolver understands in an uncanny way the significance of the ordinary, the fleeting moment that may
become lost or become catharsis. She writes with refreshing clarity, humor and honesty."
-- Detroit Free Press
Submitted by Publisher, June, 2001
Summary
Barbara Kingsolver's ten published books include novels, collections of short stories, poetry, essays, and an oral history. Her work has been translated into more than a dozen languages and has earned literary awards and a devoted readership at home and abroad. In 2000, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal, our country's highest honor for service through the arts. Ms. Kingsolver grew up in Kentucky and earned a graduate degree in biology before becoming a full-time writer. With her husband, Steven Hopp, she co-writes articles on natural history, plays jazz, gardens, and raises two daughters. Their family divides its time between Tucson, Arizona, and a farm in southern Appalachia.