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In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can," Barbara Kingsolver wrote in her debut novel The Bean Trees, first published in 1988. Back then she could not have known that her entire ethos as one of our finest creative writers, public intellectuals, and humanitarians would be summed up in this statement. But consciously or not, that's what Kingsolver has tried to do time and time again in her award-winning works of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry; in her advocacy on behalf of the environment, local foods, and social justice; and in her establishment of the Bellwether Prize for writers of "unusually powerful fiction."
A daughter of Appalachia who has lived and worked all over the world, Kingsolver has produced novels-among them The Poisonwood Bible, The Lacuna, and Flight Behavior-short story collections, essays, and poems that have been translated into more than two dozen languages. She has received Britain's Orange Prize for Fiction, the James Beard Award, the National Humanities Medal, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, as well as being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
In a recent conversation with acclaimed writer and teacher Crystal Wilkinson, Kingsolver spoke of how her rural upbringing has "never left [her] psyche," finding her literary voice, and writing across genres.
cryStAl wilKinSon: As a child you grew up in carlisle, Kentucky, and then lived briefly in the congo. how did your sense of the outside world as a girl develop? how did it frame your identity as a woman and as a writer?
BArBArA KingSolvEr: You've put your finger on the formative moment in my lifelong sense of place, belonging, and point-of-view. As a rural child in Kentucky, I claimed as my own universe the fields and woods surrounding our farm, and the few dozen children with whom I attended first grade. The next year my parents abruptly moved our family to the Republic of Congo, where my father provided health care to people who badly needed it. Instead of going to school I spent many months prowling with my brother around a village of thatched mud houses, no electricity or plumbing, no school, no stores, no roads or automobiles. We tried to befriend children who...