C O N V E R S A T I O N
POETRY, ACTIVISM, AND THE POSSIBILITY OF REDEMPTION FELICIA MITCHELL Barbara Kingsolver was born in 1955 and grew up in rural Kentucky. She earned degrees in biology from DePauw University and the University of Arizona and has worked as a freelance writer and author since 1985. At various times in her adult life, she has lived in England, France, and the Canary Islands, and has worked in Europe, Africa, Asia, Mexico, and South America. She spent two decades in Tucson, Arizona, before moving to southwestern Virginia where she currently resides. She has published novels, nonfiction, poetry, and newspaper articles, with her literary works being translated into more than two dozen languages and included in numerous literary anthologies as well as in core literature curricula in high schools and colleges across the nation. She published Another America/Otra America (with Spanish translations by Rebeca Cartes), a collection of poems grounded in her life in the American Southwest, with The Seal Press in 1992. Some poems were written in the 1980s and others, in a revised edition, in the 1990s. Many novels and works of nonfiction appeared between this book and How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons), a collection of poems growing out of Appalachia and beyond, including Italy, that was released in 2020. In 2022, with a renewed interest in her poetry, and with Kingsolver mindful of the current border crisis, Seal Edition published a third edition of Another America/Otra America. The poems look at past and present political events with attention to racism, discrimination, and immigration, as well as the possibility of redemption and change. In this conversation, Kingsolver elaborates on her craft and the relevance of poetry growing out of personal experiences, political revelations, and relationships.
Steven L. Hopp
A Conversation with
BARBARA KINGSOLVER