Barbara Ellen Kingsolver grew up in rural Carlisle, Kentucky, and counts Southern writers such as Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, and William Faulkner among her earliest literary influences. Born on 8 April 1955 in Annapolis, Maryland, she is the daughter of a county physician. Her youth was spent immersed in both the storytelling culture of Appalachia and the scientific culture of her father's profession. When she was in the second grade, she moved to Africa with her family, where her father worked for almost a year as a physician in the Congo. In Africa she began her lifelong habit of keeping a journal. “What I feel,” Kingsolver told interviewer L. Elisabeth Beattie, “is that writing is the thing that makes my experience real to me.” In 1982, twenty years after beginning her first journal, Kingsolver finally wrote there, “I am a writer.” Wendell Roy and Virginia Lee Henry Kingsolver, her parents, instilled in Barbara and her siblings, Rob and Ann, a love for reading and a respect for the natural world. Biochemistry, Kingsolver insists, can be as poetic as William Shakespeare.
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