I’ll admit, I did not look through all four hundred entries to find her name, but she’s not in the most recent two hundred, so I’ll just assume that no one has added her yet.
She’s a good example especially for little girls, because she started her career at the age of nine. Barbara began keeping a diary of poems and stories as a child, and entered every essay contest she knew about. She was first published after writing an essay entitled “Why We Need a New Elementary School,” which appeared in the local newspaper prior to a school-bond election; the bond was passed.
She earned her degree in biology and traveled through Europe before settling in Tucson, Arizona. She wrote her first novel, The Bean Trees entirely at night, in the abundant free time made available by chronic insomnia during pregnancy. The Bean Trees has now been adopted into the core curriculum of high school and college literature classes across the U.S., and has been translated into more than a dozen languages.
She has written eleven more books since then, including the novels Animal Dreams , Pigs in Heaven, The Poisonwood Bible, and Prodigal Summer ; a collection of short stories (Homeland ); poetry (Another America ); an oral history (Holding the Line ); two essay collections (High Tide in Tucson, Small Wonder ); a prose-poetry text accompanying the photography of Annie Griffiths Belt (Last Stand ); and most recently, her first full-length narrative non-fiction, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. She has contributed to dozens of literary anthologies, and her reviews and articles have appeared in most major U.S. newspapers and magazines. Her books have earned major literary awards at home and abroad, and in 2000 she received the National Humanities Medal, our nation’s highest honor for service through the arts.
Barbara is married and has two daughters. They live on a farm in Virginia, where they grow organic foods and raise free-range poultry. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle outlines her family’s quest to eat locally grown foods and support local farmers. On May 3rd of this year, she was recognized by the state of New York, and a proclamation now hangs in City Hall, for her efforts in making her voice heard in the community concerning these matter. May 3rd is now known as “Barbara Kingsolver Appreciation Day.”
Essentially, she’s a badass. Well, at least this nerdy girl thinks so.
