Small Wonder
Essays
by Barbara Kingsolver

List Price: $12.95
Pages: 288
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0060504080
Publisher: Perennial

Barbara Kingsolver was born 1955 in eastern Kentucky, the daughter of a rural physician. As a child, she wrote stories and essays and kept a journal religiously. Kingsolver left Kentucky to attend DePauw University in Indiana, where she majored in biology, took a creative writing course, and became active in anti-Vietnam War protests. After graduating in 1977, she pursued graduate studies in biology and ecology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she received a Masters of Science degree. She also enrolled in a writing class taught by author Francine Prose.

After graduate school, a position as a science writer for the University of Arizona led her into feature writing for journals and newspapers. Her articles have appeared in a variety of publications, including The Nation, The New York Times, and Smithsonian. In 1986 she won an Arizona Press Club award for outstanding feature writing.

From 1985 through 1987, Kingsolver was a freelance journalist by day, but she was writing fiction by night. Inflicted with insomnia, she began to write her first novel in a closet, so as not to wake her husband. The Bean Trees was published by HarperCollins in 1988, and enthusiastically received by critics. It was followed by the story collection, Homeland and Other Stories (1989), the novels, Animal Dreams (1990), and Pigs in Heaven (1993), and the bestselling High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now and Never (1995). Kingsolver has also published a collection of poetry, Another America: Otra America (1992), and a nonfiction book, Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 (1996). The Poisonwood Bible, published in 1998, was an Oprah's Book Club selection and national bestseller, as was her most recent novel, Prodigal Summer, released in 2000.

Barbara Kingsolver presently lives outside of Tucson with her husband, Steven Hopp, and her two daughters, Camille and Lily. When not writing, she gardens, cooks, hikes, plays hand drums and keyboards with her husband, a guitarist, and works as an environmental activist and human-rights advocate.

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