Barbara Kingsolver
Author of The Poisonwood Bible
About the Author
Barbara Kingsolver was born on April 8, 1955 in Annapolis, Maryland and grew up in Eastern Kentucky. As a child, Kingsolver used to beg her mother to tell her bedtime stories. She soon started to write stories and essays of her own, and at the age of nine, she began to keep a journal. After show more graduating with a degree in biology form De Pauw University in Indiana in 1977, Kingsolver pursued graduate studies in biology and ecology at the University of Arizona in Tucson. She earned her Master of Science degree in the early 1980s. A position as a science writer for the University of Arizona soon led Kingsolver into feature writing for journals and newspapers. Her articles have appeared in a number of publications, including The Nation, The New York Times, and Smithsonian magazines. In 1985, she married a chemist, becoming pregnant the following year. During her pregnancy, Kingsolver suffered from insomnia. To ease her boredom when she couldn't sleep, she began writing fiction Barbara Kingsolver's first fiction novel, The Bean Trees, published in 1988, is about a young woman who leaves rural Kentucky and finds herself living in urban Tucson. Since then, Kingsolver has written other novels, including Holding the Line, Homeland, and Pigs in Heaven. In 1995, after the publication of her essay collection High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never, Kingsolver was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from her alma mater, De Pauw University. Her latest works include The Lacuna and Flight Behavior. Barbara's nonfiction book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was written with her family. This is the true story of the family's adventures as they move to a farm in rural Virginia and vow to eat locally for one year. They grow their own vegetables, raise their own poultry and buy the rest of their food directly from farmers markets and other local sources. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Series
Works by Barbara Kingsolver
The Complete Fiction: The Bean Trees, Homeland, Animal Dreams, Pigs in Heaven (1995) 94 copies, 3 reviews
Homeland {short story} 2 copies
Rose-Johnny {short story} 1 copy
惡魔浮生錄 1 copy
Loveroot * 1 copy
Kingsolver, Barbara Archive 1 copy
Kingsolver Barbara 1 copy
falling house 1 copy
Associated Works
King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1998) — Foreword, some editions — 5,604 copies, 144 reviews
A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (1949) — Introduction, some editions — 5,131 copies, 74 reviews
Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from the New York Times (2001) — Contributor — 482 copies, 5 reviews
Sisters of the Earth: Women's Prose and Poetry About Nature (1991) — Contributor — 443 copies, 5 reviews
Teaching with Fire: Poetry That Sustains the Courage to Teach (2003) — Contributor — 225 copies, 1 review
Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present (2007) — Contributor — 219 copies, 3 reviews
I Should Have Stayed Home: The Worst Trips of the Great Writers (1994) — Contributor — 188 copies, 5 reviews
This Is My Best: Great Writers Share Their Favorite Work (2004) — Contributor — 175 copies, 3 reviews
Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America's Past and Each Other (2001) — Contributor — 139 copies, 1 review
War No More: Three Centuries of American Antiwar and Peace Writing (2016) — Contributor — 110 copies, 2 reviews
Mid-life Confidential: The Rock Bottom Remainders Tour America with Three Chords and an Attitude (1994) — Contributor — 76 copies, 4 reviews
Did My Mama Like to Dance? and Other Stories about Mothers and Daughters (1994) — Contributor — 42 copies
The Haves and Have Nots: 30 Stories About Money and Class in America (1999) — Contributor — 36 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- Kingsolver, Barbara Ellen
- Birthdate
- 1955-04-08
- Gender
- female
- Education
- DePauw University (BS|1977|biology)
University of Arizona (MS|ecology and evolutionary biology) - Occupations
- novelist
poet
short story writer - Organizations
- Rock Bottom Remainders (band)
- Awards and honors
- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (2023)
James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction (2022)
National Humanities Medal (2000)
Best American Science and Nature Writing (2001)
Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award (2011)
Arizona Press Club Award for Outstanding Feature Writing (1986) (show all 14)
Women's Prize for Fiction (2010, 2023)
Orange Prize for Fiction (2010)
James Beard Foundation Award (2008)
Los Angeles Times Book Prize (1993)
Library of Virginia Lifetime Achievement Award (2014)
Virginia Women in History (2018)
Honorary Doctorate of Letters, DePauw University (1994)
Phi Beta Kappa (DePauw University, 1977) - Agent
- Frances Goldin (Frances Goldin Literary Agency)
- Relationships
- Kingsolver, Camille (daughter)
Hopp, Steven (husband)
Hopp, Lily (daughter) - Short biography
- Barbara Kingsolver is an American novelist, essayist and poet. She was raised in rural Kentucky and lived briefly in the Congo in her early childhood. Kingsolver earned degrees in biology at DePauw University and the University of Arizona and worked as a freelance writer before she began writing novels. Her widely known works include The Poisonwood Bible, the tale of a missionary family in the Congo, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a non-fiction account of her family's attempts to eat locally. Her work often focuses on topics such as social justice, biodiversity and the interaction between humans and their communities and environments.
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Annapolis, Maryland, USA
- Places of residence
- Carlisle, Kentucky, USA
Léopoldville, Congo (now Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo)
Greencastle, Indiana, USA
Tucson, Arizona, USA
Washington County, Virginia, USA
England, UK (show all 8)
France
Canary Islands, Spain - Map Location
- USA
Members
Discussions
group read [Demon Copperhead] in Club Read 2025 (July 2025)
"Demon Copperhead" by Barbara Kingsolver in 75 Books Challenge for 2023 (March 2024)
August 2019: Barbara Kingsolver in Monthly Author Reads (December 2020)
Barbara Kingsolver: American Author Challenge in 75 Books Challenge for 2015 (December 2015)
[The Lacuna] by [[Barbara Kingsolver]] in Orange January/July (July 2011)
Reviews
White People Suffering/Going Mad in Jungle is one of my favourite genres, so Kingsolver would have had to fuck up quite substantially to turn me against this story. Telling it via multiple first-person (children, at that) narratives is a high-risk choice, but the voices of all four sisters are solidly established early on, and they all stand up to repeated exposure, although the tics that help establish Adah (wordplay) and Rachel (malapropisms), although deployed cleverly, do begin to grate show more after a while. The other thing that would have spoiled it for me is lopsided perspective — too much indulgence or mockery of the hapless Americans, or an insufficiently grounded portrayal of the long-suffering Congolese — but I think the balance is pretty spot on. What I like about this kind of book is the sticky, icky, sweaty, savage hostility of the jungle, and it's described copiously and thrillingly here. In their first year in the Congo, The Prices are faced with swarms of ants, noxious plants, horrible food, no food, hungry crocs, killer snakes, deluge, drought, and a who's who of tropical maladies. It's great. And just like in The Mosquito Coast, it's all because of a mad dad — in this case a God-botherer, but the real issue is his incurable egomania.
The last 150 pages are a very attenuated epilogue, and I got the feeling that the various "what happened next" stories were Kingsolver's way of restating her critique of colonialism/American imperialism in case you didn't get the point earlier or, like me, were primarily here for overheated malarial Heart of Darkness hellishness. They might also have been written to get her past the 500-page mark required for reviewers and publicists to use the word "epic". Still, I ripped through this book like a plague of ants through an unattended chicken. show less
The last 150 pages are a very attenuated epilogue, and I got the feeling that the various "what happened next" stories were Kingsolver's way of restating her critique of colonialism/American imperialism in case you didn't get the point earlier or, like me, were primarily here for overheated malarial Heart of Darkness hellishness. They might also have been written to get her past the 500-page mark required for reviewers and publicists to use the word "epic". Still, I ripped through this book like a plague of ants through an unattended chicken. show less
This book was a wild and brutal ride. Demon Copperhead, our narrator, is basically doomed from the start. However, buoyed by a few decent friends and a wicked sense of humor, he manages, somehow, to survive and keep his head above water. He spends much of his teenage years in a broken foster care system, along with run-ins with less than savory characters. As Demon says, “The wonder is that you start with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.”
Themes: Death, addiction, show more poverty, abuse, broken families and loss, over and over again.
Despite the multiple traumas and attendant pain, I loved this book. 500+ pages flew by. (Oh, and the cover art is beautiful.) After I finished this book I felt slightly shaken and bereft. An extraordinary read. Barbara Kingsolver is a storytelling master. show less
Themes: Death, addiction, show more poverty, abuse, broken families and loss, over and over again.
Despite the multiple traumas and attendant pain, I loved this book. 500+ pages flew by. (Oh, and the cover art is beautiful.) After I finished this book I felt slightly shaken and bereft. An extraordinary read. Barbara Kingsolver is a storytelling master. show less
As usual, Kingsolver has tucked a lot of social commentary into a very engaging story, and just barely avoided the level of preachiness that makes me twitch. Her subject this time is the opioid crisis, particularly in rural working class communities with few resources where people are subject to exploitation on so many levels, and under-served by society's supposed "safety nets". The author set herself the task of "reinvent{ing} David Copperfield chapter by chapter to fit the dimensions of show more my own place and time." And a marvelous job she's done. The names alone bring Dickens to mind--the main character Damon Fields, a/k/a Demon Copperhead; his best friends "Angus", Tommy, and Maggot; his grandmother, Betsey Woodall; the Peggot family; the McCobbs and my personal favorite, "U-Haul" Pyles. The story of orphaned Demon and the trials of his life in Lee County, Virginia, parallels that of the Dickensian David, but it is not necessary in the least that the reader be familiar with the original. Having read [Copperfield] several times, I noted its influence subliminally, for the most part, while reading this modern version. And even with the foreknowledge of how it all would probably come out, I confess to having teared up a little at the end. And that doesn't happen to me very often. show less
I admit that I almost put this down more than a few times. But something kept pulling me back. I'm a big Kingsolver fan and read most of her work. If you are not interested in reading about poverty in America, the inept foster care system, rampant drug use, racism and more of the like-then don't pick this book to read. It will make you cry at the injustice. However, because it's told as a reflection back on his life it goes right to the gut. You can't help but love Demon and root for him to show more go all the way. BK has a way of writing that brings every character to life and never let you forget them. This is one of those books - the one you will never forget, the one that made you laugh, cry, and furious at the world where so many have so much and so many have so little. I didn't want it to end! show less
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Awards
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Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 48
- Also by
- 31
- Members
- 99,233
- Popularity
- #92
- Rating
- 4.1
- Reviews
- 2,403
- ISBNs
- 588
- Languages
- 22
- Favorited
- 555
