Best of Tucson 1996: Best Local Author

Best Local Author

Barbara Kingsolver

READERS' AND STAFF PICK: No doubt about it, Barbara Kingsolver has found a permanent place in Tucsonans' hearts. She's a big-time author now--her third novel, Pigs in Heaven, was on the New York Times bestseller list for weeks--but nobody thinks she's gotten too big for her Tucson breeches. Far from it: Locals are as proud of her as any hometown can be, adopted hometown though we are to this native Kentuckian. Partly it's because Kingsolver's work remains rooted in the lives of real people, people who are not in the least bit like all those in-crowd city slickers who normally populate the best-sellers' list. Kingsolver possesses a sturdy social conscience, and she writes compassionately about the lives of the working poor, of undocumented immigrants, of struggling families, often setting her work in the redeeming desert landscape of Arizona. Much of Pigs was about the difficulties in extremis of a single mom trying to raise a little girl on a near-minimum wage job. It was also about the need for family, for community, and dare we say in these Hillary-maligning days, for a village, to bring up children successfully. Kingsolver's most recent book, the marvelously named High Tide in Tucson, is a collection of essays that detail some of Kingsolver's own struggles to create community, along with her views of such things as the Persian Gulf War (U.S. bombs killed 250,000 Iraqi civilians, many of them children, the author tells us); the compromised condition of some Kentucky forests; and a displaced hermit crab exiled to Tucson who does his level best to honor his natural rhythms. Many of the essays were printed elsewhere before going into the book, including, we here at The Weekly are happy to say, "In the Belly of the Beast," an account of her visit to the Titan Missile Museum, which we published back in '86 in a somewhat different form. Like a lot of Tucsonans, we're proud to say, "Barbara, we knew you when."