Barbara Kingsolver
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Barbara Kingsolver is an American fiction writer. She has written several novels and poems, and established the Bellwether Prize for "literature of social change".
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Biography
Barbara Kingsolver was born 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." [1] (http://www.kingsolver.com/about/about.asp)
Kingsolver graduated from DePauw University in 1977. She pursued graduate studies at the University of Arizona in the early 1980s, where she got her Masters of Science. In 1985 she became a freelance journalist, while continuing to write fiction by night. Kingsolver began writing The Bean Trees in a closet during a bout of insomnia. She also became active in organizations advocating social change and humanitarian goals.
In 1997 Kingsolver established the Bellwether Prize which is awarded on even-numbered years to writing that supports social change. The prize is limited to authors who have no previous major works published.
She divides her time between Tucson, AZ and Kentucky, and has spent periods of time residing in other countries - as a child in the Congo, where the The Poisonwood Bible was set. She is married to Stephen Hopp, a faculty member at rhe University of Arizona, with whom she occasionally collaborates on musical and literary projects.[2] (http://magazine.audubon.org/features0009/scarlet.html)
Literary themes
Social justice is an important theme in the work The Bean Trees, and throughout her novels. In this novel the main character, Taylor, meets a family of Guatemalan immigrants, who explain how they were forced to leave their daughter behind to escape torture and death in their home country.
In The Poisonwood Bible she also examines the role of the United States and other political powers in colonial and post-colonial Africa. She is quite critical of Western governments.
Native Americans are a prominent theme in several of Kingsolver's books and a few of her poems, especially relating to the prejudice against Native Americans by white settlers and the Trail of Tears. Her book Pigs in Heaven (a sequel to The Bean Trees) features Turtle, a Cherokee child who was abandoned and left to Taylor. This book highlights the conditions of Native Americans currently in Oklahoma, and the continuation of their traditional ways despite poverty and continuing inequality.
Poverty is the focus of several of her books such as Holding the Line, a book about the Arizona Mine Strike of 1983. Taylor, the main character of Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven, grew up in poverty and has to continually struggle against it.
In Kingsolver's book of poems, Another America, social justice is a central theme.
Books
- The Bean Trees, 1988
- Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983, 1989
- Homeland and Other Stories, 1989
- Animal Dreams, 1990
- Another America, 1992
- Pigs in Heaven, 1993
- High Tide in Tucson, 1995
- The Poisonwood Bible, 1998
- Prodigal Summer, 2000
- Small Wonder, 2002
- Last Stand: America's virgin lands, 2002 (with photographer Annie Griffiths)
External link
- Official website (http://www.kingsolver.com)
- The Patience of a Saint. National Geographic, 2000 (http://eebweb.arizona.edu/courses/Ecol206/SanPedro_NG_Kingsolver.pdf).
Sources
- Biography (http://www.kingsolver.com/about/about.asp)