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Barbara Kingsolver is an US fiction writer. She has written several novels and poems, and established the Bellwether Prize for "literature of social change".

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Barbara Kingsolver was born April 8, 1955 in Annapolis, Maryland. She grew up in Nicholas County, Kentucky, "in the middle of an alfalfa field in the part of eastern Kentucky that lies between the opulent horse farms and the impoverished coal fields." [1]

Kingsolver graduated from DePauw University in 1977 where she majored in biology. She pursued graduate studies at the University of Arizona, in 1981 receiving an MS degree in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. In 1985 she became a freelance journalist, while continuing to write fiction by night. Kingsolver began writing in a closet during a bout of insomnia. She also became active in organizations advocating social change and humanitarian goals.

In 1997 Kingsolver established the Bellwether Prize, which is awarded on even-numbered years to writing that supports social change. The prize is limited to authors who have no previous major works published.

She divides her time between Tucson, Arizona and Kentucky, and has spent periods of time residing in other countries - as a child in The Congo, where was set. She is married to Stephen Hopp, a faculty member at the University of Arizona, with whom she occasionally collaborates on musical and literary projects. She has two daughters.[2]

, and throughout her novels. In this novel the main character, Taylor, meets a family of Guatemalan immigrants, who explain how they were forced to leave their daughter behind to escape torture and death in their home country.

In she also examines the role of the United States and other political powers in colonial and post-colonial Africa. She is quite critical of Western governments.

Native Americans are a prominent theme in several of Kingsolver's books and a few of her poems, especially relating to the prejudice against Native Americans by white settlers and the Trail of Tears. Her book ) features Turtle, a Cherokee child who was abandoned and left to Taylor. This book highlights the conditions of Native Americans currently in Oklahoma, and the continuation of their traditional ways despite poverty and continuing inequality.

Poverty is the focus of several of her books such as , grew up in poverty and has to continually struggle against it.

In Kingsolver's book of poems,