The Lacuna

Born April 8, 1955 is a progressive Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, essayist, and poet. Her widely known works include The Poisonwood Bible, the tale of a missionary family in the Congo, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a nonfiction account of her family's attempts to eat locally. In 2023, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the novel Demon Copperhead. Her work often focuses on topics such as social justice, biodiversity, and the interaction between humans and their communities and environments. Kingsolver has received numerous awards, including the Dayton Literary Peace Prize's Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award 2011 and the National Humanities Medal. After winning for The Lacuna in 2010 and Demon Copperhead in 2023, Kingsolver became the first author to win the Women's Prize for Fiction twice. Each of her books published since 1993 has been on the New York Times Best Seller list. Kingsolver was raised in rural Kentucky, lived briefly in the Congo in her early childhood, and currently lives in the Appalachia area of the United States. She earned degrees in biology, ecology, and evolutionary biology at DePauw University and the University of Arizona and worked as a freelance writer before she began writing novels. In 2000, Kingsolver established the Bellwether Prize to support "literature of social change".