Barbara Kingsolver wore a gray and blue patterned sweater she made herself, with wool sheared from sheep she and her husband raise.
On a cool late September afternoon, she sat on the front porch of her Meadowview farm, a place in Washington County she has called home for decades. It’s tucked between rolling wooded hills, far down a gravel path flanked by sheep paddocks and a barn where guinea fowl perch. Farther up the slopes are gardens, where the couple regularly harvests seasonal vegetables and herbs.
As she rocked back and forth in her chair, she said her calling is to write stories about Appalachia.
“This region is so underrepresented in American culture that most people outside of here don’t even know how to pronounce it,” Kingsolver said. “This is a huge part of the country that people think they know about from hearing other people talk about it, not us. Every book I write will be about Appalachia.”
An award-winning author, 71-year-old Kingsolver’s writing returns to the region in her 10th novel, “Partita.” Protagonist Livia Cable is raised on an East Tennessee cattle farm, and her home and upbringing are woven into each chapter. The farm is in fictional Steele County, though Kingsolver said it could be based in real-life Sullivan County, which includes the Tennessee side of Bristol.
The novel is set to be released Tuesday. It comes after Kingsolver’s 2022 nationwide sensation, “Demon Copperhead,” which retells Charles Dickens’ “David Copperfield” set in Southwest Virginia against a backdrop of an early wave of the opioid epidemic.
It wasn’t her first novel based in Appalachia, but it became her most popular one. It won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction alongside a slew of other accolades, and it was a commercial success, selling more than 3 million copies to date.
There’s a need for more stories about the region, Kingsolver said. Take “Partita” as an example, she said — a key part of the plot involves a young Appalachian woman falling in love with classical piano and receiving a college scholarship for her talents. She practices on her church piano. The name of the novel refers back to what classical dance compositions for solo instruments are typically called.
Kingsolver herself, raised in Kentucky tobacco country, went to DePauw University in Indiana on a piano scholarship.
“Rural kids can do that,” she said. “I was a rural kid. I loved reading. I loved piano. Nobody told me to love those things. I just did.”
But that’s not an Appalachian story that movies, TV shows or news stations will tell you, she said.
“We have not been allowed to represent ourselves,” Kingsolver said. “Comedians will bring us up, and you just cringe, because they’re going to make some joke about missing teeth or having sex with animals. It’s really just an outrage. So this is what I can do: I can write from the place I live, about who we are, which is so many things. Our life is so complex and so nuanced.”
“Partita” addresses the difficulty of moving far from a rural home to go to college, a lack of health insurance among farming families, what the arts should mean to a person and a variety of other topics, Kingsolver said.
She could write 100 novels about the region and still have more to say, she said.
Appalachia remains a national blind spot, she said, and that is often her primary challenge when writing novels nestled in the mountain towns she knows well. She keeps words like ‘holler’ and ‘reckon’ off the first couple of pages.
“I invite a reader to get to know the characters and the place and invest, and then I will ease them into some of the parts of life that might come across as negative or more easily stereotyped,” she said.
Still, the easiest part of writing stories about the region is the language, she said. It comes naturally to her after being raised around colorful figures of speech and nicknames.
It’s a homecoming, she said, to write in the voices that are so familiar to her.
“The beauty of our language, the idioms and the diction — you know, saying somebody’s as ugly as a mud stick fence,” she said. “Those particular grounded ways of likening one thing to another. I just love that. I love being allowed to use my mother tongue on the page.”
During college, she taught herself how to speak without an Appalachian accent, she said. Mocking comments about her voice and where she came from were a rude awakening for her to the prejudices people had about her home.
Some of her college friends made her a faux Kentucky passport that “allowed” her to cross the Ohio River and go to school in Indiana — a joke that hurt, Kingsolver said. She began to shut out her heritage.
“I sort of tried to construct a new persona, a worldly Barbara who was not from Kentucky,” she said. “I don’t think she was a big success.”
She worked abroad after college doing archeological digs: Greece, France, England. Then she settled in Tucson, Arizona, as a technical writer and a freelance journalist. She got married, had a child, then divorced, writing her first book (set in Arizona) somewhere in between. Nowhere felt quite like home, Kingsolver said.
Discovering other Kingsolvers
During the 1990s, she was offered a college teaching fellowship. She accepted under the condition that the fellowship would place her somewhere in southern Appalachia, she said, near relatives who could help her with her daughter. Kingsolver was raising her alone after the divorce.
The fellowship placed her at Emory & Henry University, in the small community of Emory, in Washington County, returning her to the region she knew.
She was more connected to the area than she realized, she said. Once, after she gave a talk at the local library, several older women walked up to her and told her they were Kingsolvers, too.
“I was used to being the only Kingsolver in town,” she said. “It was such an unusual name. And they said, ‘Oh, yes, used to be you couldn’t walk around here without stepping on a Kingsolver.’”
She called her father later that night, and he told her their bloodline came from Washington County. There are Kingsolvers in cemeteries around the area, she said, and her ancestors have lived there for eight generations.
“This was amazing to me, just by a roll of the dice,” she said. “I was sent back to the origin site of Kingsolvers.”
Washington County has been home ever since, she said. She met her current husband, Steven Hopp, at the university, where he currently teaches environmental science. He owned the property that has now become their farm. Before they started dating, he took her there after a day of classes to walk the grounds and build a campfire.
These days, they roast peppers and tomatillos harvested from the garden as autumn approaches, and they rotate many varieties of flowers in their front yard’s garden. In addition to guinea fowl, they keep chickens, Icelandic sheep, a donkey to protect the sheep and a brown and white collie named Hugo.
She wrote “Demon Copperhead” while sitting at a desk in her Meadowview cottage home because she wanted to rewrite the narrative about the place she knew so well, Kingsolver said. Specifically, the story was about drug addiction in the Virginia coalfields.
People have taken so much from Appalachia, she said — first timber, then coal. Then the extractive industry interested in the mountain hollers transformed into some of the big pharmaceutical companies. They preyed upon Appalachian people’s pain, Kingsolver said, starting in Lee County.
“OxyContin, God’s gift for the laid-off deep-hole man with his back and neck bones grinding like bags of gravel,” Kingsolver writes in the voice of Damon Fields, the book’s narrator. “For the bent-over lady pulling double shifts at Dollar General with her shot knees and ADHD grandkids to raise by herself. For every football player with some of this or that torn up, and the whole world riding on his getting back in the game. This was our deliverance. The tree was shaken and yes, we did eat of the apple.”
She wanted to humanize drug addiction through Fields’ story, she said, and point a mainstream audience toward the source of southern Appalachia’s plight, rather than continue to allow some observers to paint drug addiction as a personality flaw.
It’s an uphill battle, Kingsolver said.
‘The House That Demon Built’
Now, she runs into the stigma surrounding drug addiction while fundraising for Higher Ground Women’s Recovery Residence.
It’s a Lee County addiction recovery house Kingsolver founded with some of the profits from “Demon Copperhead” sales. It opened in 2025 in Pennington Gap — nicknamed “The House That Demon Built.” Partial profits from “Partita” will flow to Higher Ground as well. Otherwise, the house is almost entirely supported by local businesses and churches in the surrounding community, Kingsolver said.
The community is willing to give, she said. Church groups “adopted” different rooms of the house to furnish them, and the local furniture store donated items for the living room. A local company donated solar collectors, so the place partially runs on solar energy, which helps with the utility bills. Members of the community volunteer to help with yard work, she said.
For centuries, people in Southwest Virginia (and Appalachia more broadly) have had to be resilient and do everything themselves, Kingsolver said.
She wants to help where she can, whether that’s cohosting a tour event with local bookstore Dragonfly Book Bar or funneling money toward various nonprofits anonymously or writing well-rounded stories about the place she grew up.
“So many of us have endured this kind of shaming from the outside and internalize it,” she said. “We still have our culture, we still tell our stories, we know each other’s business and we care. That’s so important and something to celebrate all the time.”
