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Bio
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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 coalfields.
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.
Critics enthusiastically received The Bean Trees, published by HarperCollins
in 1988, and reissued in a special ten-year anniversary hardcover
edition in 1998. 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 accessibility. 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 followed by the collection, Homeland and Other Stories
the novels Animal Dreams (1990), and Pigs in Heaven (1993), and
the bestselling High Tide in Tucson: Essays From Now or Never 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 1983 (ILR Press/Cornell
University Press, 1989, 1996). The Poisonwood Bible is 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. Her most recent novel
is The Prodigal Summer which weaves together three stories of human
love within a larger tapestry of lives inhabiting the forested mountains
and struggling small farms of southern Appalachia.
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."
Visit
her website at http://www.kingsolver.com/
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