Barbara Ellen Kingsolver (born April 8, 1955) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, essayist, and poet.

[6][8] After graduating from high school, Kingsolver attended DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, on a music scholarship, studying classical piano.

She changed her major to biology after realizing that "classical pianists compete for six job openings a year, and the rest of [them] get to play 'Blue Moon' in a hotel lobby".

[12][13] During the first First Gulf War, she moved with her daughter to Tenerife in the Canary Islands for a year, mostly due to her frustration over America's military involvement.

[6] In 2008, she received an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Duke University, where she delivered a commencement address entitled "How to Be Hopeful".

[16] In the late 1990s, Kingsolver was a founding member of the Rock Bottom Remainders, a rock-and-roll band made up of published writers.

Other band members included Amy Tan, Matt Groening, Dave Barry, and Stephen King, and they played for one week during the year.

[5] The Poisonwood Bible, published in 1998, is one of her best-known works; it chronicles the lives of the wife and daughters of a Baptist missionary on a Christian mission in Africa.

[27] Kingsolver wrote a Los Angeles Times opinion piece following the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan in the wake of the September 11 attacks, which received widespread criticism for conflating innocent Afghans with the Taliban regime.

[29] Starting in April 2005, Kingsolver and her family spent a year making every effort to eat food produced as locally as possible.

[34] In 2011, Kingsolver was the first ever recipient of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award.

The newly named award to celebrate the U.S. diplomat who played an instrumental role in negotiating the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995.

The novel was inspired by David Copperfield and is set in southern Appalachia, dealing with the effects of the opioid crisis on the region's families.

[2] In 2023, Demon Copperhead received the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction alongside Hernan Diaz's Trust, the first time the award was shared in its history.

Her prose poetry also accompanied photographs by Annie Griffiths Belt in a 2002 work titled Last Stand: America's Virgin Lands.

[39] Her major nonfiction works include her 1990 publication Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983[40][2] and 2007's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a description of eating locally.

[42] She has stated that she wanted to create a literary prize to "encourage writers, publishers, and readers to consider how fiction engages visions of social change and human justice".

[45] Her characters are frequently written around struggles for social equality, such as the hardships faced by undocumented immigrants, the working poor, and single mothers.