The faded 1973 yearbook of the Nicholas County High School Blue Jackets in the Carlisle public library contains a black-and-white photo of a pretty, long-haired teenager with a faraway gaze lounging on a chair and sipping a soft drink.
Look at the photo long enough, and you wonder what was on the young girl’s mind.
It is a curious though serene pose of Barbara Kingsolver, who in May was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her hilarious and heart-warming 2022 novel Demon Copperhead. She has written nine novels and several books of poetry, essays and nonfiction. An international author whose works have been translated in 20 languages, Kingsolver published her first book, The Bean Trees, in 1988.
She has become one of the world’s most acclaimed writers.
The high school photo showed a private side of Kingsolver, said Peggy Whalen, an administrative assistant at the school today who was a year ahead of Kingsolver in school.
“I remember she was usually seen either reading or writing. She was a very intelligent young lady and is greatly admired around here for what she has done with her life,” Whalen said. “You could tell in high school she was not going to stay around here very long.”
‘I Love Carlisle’
With a population of 2,443, Carlisle is the county seat of Nicholas County. Founded in 1816, the town is about halfway between Lexington and Maysville on the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.
Carlisle’s downtown has a magnificent old courthouse, along with a new judicial center and various businesses and shops in Victorian-era buildings.
Nicholas County, with about 7,532 residents, has a picturesque, rural character, with a rolling countryside and winding roads that lead past farms, wooded glades and small communities. Before Kingsolver, its most notable residents were pioneer Daniel Boone and the late political activist Gatewood Galbraith.
Many of its residents cringe when Nicholas County is placed in Appalachia. “We’re not Appalachia. We don’t mine coal here,” said Jerry Johnson with the local tourism board and history museum. Nicholas County, however, is one of 54 Kentucky counties in the Appalachian Regional Commission, an economic development partnership entity of the federal government and 13 state governments focusing on 423 counties.
Kingsolver calls herself “an Appalachian writer,” but that has more to do with her living on a farm in southwest Virginia near Abingdon than growing up in Carlisle. She has lived there (70 miles from the Kentucky state line) since 2004 with her husband, Steven Hopp, an author and sciences educator.
In a recent interview, Kingsolver talked about growing up in Carlisle and its impact on her life.
“I love Carlisle,” she said. “I love it in the way that you love the place that made you who you are. I’ve always had a very complicated relationship with Carlisle, but I think that all of us who have lived in a really small town know that the bad thing about small-town life is that everybody knows your business, and the beautiful thing about small-town life is that everybody knows your business.
“I probably had to grow up and leave there in order to appreciate the second half of that equation.”
Growing Up in Carlisle
Spend some time in Carlisle and you will see little indication that such a famous writer as Kingsolver grew up there. There is no historical marker of the town’s famous daughter.
Mary McCord, manager of Carlisle Gifts & Collectibles on Main Street, has several of Kingsolver’s books in a display at her store. McCord sold all 12 of her first order of Kingsolver’s latest book. “She’s been gone awhile, and some people say she doesn’t come back enough. But she still is highly thought of here by many, and people are very interested about her,” McCord said.
Barbara Kingsolver was born April 8, 1955, in Annapolis, Maryland, to Wendell R. Kingsolver, a doctor who was on duty in the United States Navy at the time, and his wife, Virginia Henry Kingsolver. Virginia, known as Ginny, was a homemaker who worked with her husband to start his family medical practice and served in volunteer groups such as the Girl Scouts, the Nicholas County Hospital (for 20 years), and the Nicholas County Development Corporation at Lake Carnico, of which she was president for a decade. The Kingsolvers frequented the 114-acre, Y-shaped Lake Carnico.
Wendell and Ginny were sweethearts for 70 years and were among the founding members of the First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Carlisle. Ginny was choir director and the first female elder in the church.
Wendell now lives in Nicholasville. Ginny died on July 1, 2013, at 83 and is buried in her native Lexington.
The Kingsolvers had two children in addition to Barbara. Dr. Robert W. Kingsolver has had a successful career as a biology professor at Bellarmine University in Louisville, and Dr. Ann E. Kingsolver is a prominent anthropology professor at the University of Kentucky.
In Carlisle, the Kingsolver family lived in a modest brick ranch house on Shepherd Hill off Scrubgrass Road near the old hospital. It had a basement office for Dr. Kingsolver and an indoor swimming pool that generated much talk in the community.
The Kingsolvers steered their children away from watching TV to reading books. Their heavily wooded backyard became an institution of higher learning about nature. Ginny was an avid birdwatcher and shared her passion with her children.
When Barbara was headed into the second grade, the family spent a year in the Congo. Barbara wrote a best-selling book, The Poisonwood Bible, in 1998 about the stories of the wife and four daughters of an evangelical Baptist who moves them to the Belgian Congo in 1959.
Kingsolver said she never writes about real people but often about places and situations with which she is familiar. She adamantly said her novels are not autobiographical but often contain common features or attributes of her life and her work.
The Kingsolver family was “wonderful,” said Wanda Wagner, who started working for Dr. Kingsolver in 1962 and was employed by him for 28 years.
“The children … I remembered they would come to the office and were so polite,” Wagner said. “Barbara was a sweet little girl. No sass from her.”
Lisa Reynolds, who was a year behind Barbara in school, said Kingsolver was “so smart. By the time she was finished with high school, she was ready to leave Carlisle.”
The 1973 yearbook listed Kingsolver in the Speech Club, French Club, Drama Club, Honor Society and as a band member who played bass clarinet. It irritated Kingsolver that girls had to take home economics while boys took shop.
Kingsolver said she was “a wallflower, not popular, introverted” in school. “Always reading, writing and studying,” she said.
Her teachers thought she was wonderful.
“The whole school knew her because she was so smart and was Dr. Wendell’s daughter,” said Martha Sue Taylor, a teacher at Nicholas County High School who retired in 1998.
Catherine “Kitty” Sagraves, now of Cynthiana, was an English teacher who taught Barbara in high school. Sagraves retired in 1999.
“She was exceptional, highly motivated. Everything she tackled, she gave her best,” said Sagraves, who recalled Barbara’s “great” role as a French character in the school play, Our Hearts Were Young and Gay. The play was based on a 1942 book about two women fresh out of college taking a tour of Europe in the 1920s.
“It was Barbara who went out into the world from Carlisle, and the world is better for that,” Sagraves said.
Barbara was a co-valedictorian of the 1973 graduating class of 80 students from Nicholas County High School.
The other “co-” was Tommy Darrell, known today as Dr. Thomas C. Darrell, a family medicine specialist in Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina.
“We were good friends in all 12 grades together,” Darrell said. “If she didn’t read every book in the school library, she came close.
“I hear from her occasionally. I miss a lot of leisure reading, so I would like to catch up on her work. I know I will always have fond memories of her.”
Earl Pfanstiel, a retired Carlisle educator, knew the entire Kingsolver family.
“I went to church with them,” he said. “Wendell loved to sing at First Christian Church, and Ginny was a fine singer. The kids were kids, and I think Barbara liked to consider herself the social misfit.
“But she wasn’t. She got good roots in Carlisle but had to—just had to—flap her wings and fly out of here as fast as she could. Some people here still resent that. She wasn’t one of those country girls who thought they had to find a good man and raise a family here. Barbara had other things on her mind.”
Leaving Carlisle
After graduating from Nicholas County High School, Barbara attended DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, where she graduated with a degree in biology.
Barbara wanted to be a writer She lived in Europe for a time, working for publications and in health care. She later entered the University of Arizona, where she earned a master’s degree in biology. She then worked as a science writer for the university. She began thinking about becoming a fiction writer in 1982 after winning a contest in a Phoenix newspaper. She was a full-time freelance journalist by 1985, and then wrote her first novel.
Also in 1985, Kingsolver married Joe Hoffman, a chemistry professor at the University of Arizona. They had a daughter, Camille. With second husband Hopp, she had a daughter, Lily.
Kingsolver rarely visits Carlisle. “There’s really no reason,” she said. “No close kin. No reason to go back.”
She did not know if she would attend this year’s 50th reunion of the 1973 Blue Jackets class. “I don’t know much about it,” she admitted.
Maybe, in the faraway gaze she had in the high school yearbook photo, she pictured places at a great distance from that small setting on the map of Kentucky called Carlisle, where her roots remain strong, though mostly out of sight.