KINGSOLVER, BARBARA

born April 8, 1955, Annapolis, Md., U.S. American writer and political activist whose best-known novels concern the strength and endurance of the poor and disenfranchised people of the American Southwest. Kingsolver grew up in eastern Kentucky, the daughter of a physician who treated the rural poor. After graduating from DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, she traveled and worked in Europe and then returned to the United States. Kingsolver's novel The Bean Trees (1988) concerns a woman who makes a meaningful life for herself and a young Cherokee girl with whom she moves from rural Kentucky to the Southwest. In Animal Dreams (1990) a disconnected woman finds purpose and moral challenges when she returns to live in her small Arizona hometown. Pigs in Heaven (1993), a sequel to her first novel, deals with the protagonist's attempts to defend her adoption of her Native American daughter. Kingsolver also wrote the nonfictional Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 (1989) and High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never (1995) and a short-story collection, Homeland and Other Stories (1989). Her poetry collection, Another America (Otra America) (1991), in English with Spanish translation, primarily concerns the struggles of impoverished women against sexual and political abuse, war, and death. With The Poisonwood Bible (1999), Kingsolver expanded her psychic and geographic territory, setting her story about the redemption of a missionary family in the Belgian Congo during the colony's struggle for independence.