This episode of The Archive Project features Barbara Kingsolver in an interview with Literary Arts executive director Andrew Proctor, as part of the 2012-13 season of Portland Arts & Lectures. The occasion for Kingsolver’s visit was the publication of a long-awaited novel, Flight Behavior. Kingsolver is perhaps best known for her novel The Poisonwood Bible which many critics and readers consider a masterpiece.

In this interview, Kingsolver discusses her most recent book, but also looks back at previous book and her craft over the span of her career, and how it relates to the political or social issues that are her themes. Kingsolver is a writer who embraces so called “political art” and who rejects the idea that it, by definition, it is a lesser form.  This “divorce”, as she calls it in this conversation, between art and the issues, is artificial and distinctly American. And it’s a divorce that can leave American artists dangerously on the sidelines of some of the most important political and social arguments of the day.

Barbara Kingsolver is the author of ten bestselling works of fiction, including the novels Unsheltered, Flight Behavior, The Lacuna, The Poisonwood Bible, Animal Dreams, and The Bean Trees, as well as books of poetry, essays, and creative nonfiction. Her work of narrative nonfiction is the influential bestseller Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Kingsolver’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has earned literary awards and a devoted readership at home and abroad. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal, our country’s highest honor for service through the arts, as well as the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for the body of her work. She lives with her family on a farm in southern Appalachia.