Homeland and Other Stories

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 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.


Her books, in order of publication, are: The Bean Trees (1988), Homeland (1989), Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike (1989), Animal Dreams (1990), Another America (1992), Pigs in Heaven (1993), High Tide in Tucson (1995), The Poisonwood Bible (1998), Prodigal Summer (2000), Small Wonder (2002), Last Stand: America's Virgin Lands, with photographer Annie Griffiths (2002), Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (2007), The Lacuna (2009), Flight Behavior (2012), Unsheltered (2018), How To Fly (In 10,000 Easy Lessons) (2020), Demon Copperhead (2022), and coauthored with Lily Kingsolver, Coyote's Wild Home (2023). She served as editor for Best American Short Stories 2001.


Kingsolver was named one the most important writers of the 20th Century by Writers Digest, and in 2023 won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel Demon Copperhead. In 2000 she received the National Humanities Medal, our country's highest honor for service through the arts. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages and have been adopted into the core curriculum in high schools and colleges throughout the nation. Critical acclaim for her work includes multiple awards from the American Booksellers Association and the American Library Association, a James Beard award, two-time Oprah Book Club selection, and the national book award of South Africa, among others. She was awarded Britain's prestigious Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize) for both Demon Copperhead and The

"A dazzling array of short stories . . . Kingsolver's knowledge of human nature, and especially domestic relationships, is breathtaking." - Publishers Weekly

"Read Homeland and Other Stories and you will feel glad to be alive. You are delighted by a gifted storyteller. You are strengthened and healed by the toughness and tenderness she discerns in humanity's daily rounds." - Newsday

"Kingsolver's humanity sounds the clearest note.telling us about characters in the middle of their days, who live as we really do, from one small incident of awareness to the next." - Los Angeles Times

"Extraordiarily fine . . . Kingsolver has a Chekhovian tenderness toward her characters . . . The title story is pure poetry." - Russell Banks, New York Times Book Review

"Kingsolver understands in an uncanny way the significance of the ordinary, the fleeting moment that may become lost or become catharsis. She writes with refreshing clarity, humor and honesty." - Detroit Free Press

"Kingsolver is an extraordinary storyteller." - Chicago Tribune

"Delightful." - New York Woman