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Sample Author Biographies

Author biographies need to address issues that are important to the reader and to critics. Some information about upbringing is nice—include some of this but don't get carried away with it. Include some information about education. For nonfiction authors, you want to emphasize your expertise and what has contributed to that. Any achievements in the field about which you are writing should naturally be mentioned. Tell about articles you have written or research you have done. Be sure to name any previous books you have authored or co-authored. We also want some personal information—anything that humanizes you.

Mapletree also wants two author biographies—a short one of about 100 to 200 words, and a long one of 300 to 400 words.

For fiction authors, you need to emphasize anything that influenced your writing, as well as other influences that affected your decision to write or your writing style. Write some about the types of books you enjoy or any other authors or anything else that influenced your writing style, your settings, or the choices of subject matter in your writing. And give a little information about your family and personal life. Stress anything that reveals your feelings and attitudes about what you do.

Here is a sample biography about Barbara Kingsolver, a well-known novelist, that includes all of these elements:

Barbara Kingsolver was born on April 8, 1955. She grew up "in the middle of an alfalfa field," in the part of eastern Kentucky that lies between the opulent horse farms and the impoverished coal fields.

Kingsolver has always been a storyteller: "I used to beg my mother to let me tell her a bedtime story." As a child, she wrote stories and essays and, beginning at the age of eight, kept a journal religiously. Still, it never occurred to Kingsolver that she could become a professional writer. Growing up in a rural place, where work centered mainly on survival, writing didn't seem to be a practical career choice. Besides, the writers she read, she once explained, "were mostly old, dead men from England. It was inconceivable that I might grow up to be one of those myself . . . "

Kingsolver left Kentucky to attend DePauw University in Indiana, where she majored in biology. She also took one creative writing course, and became active in social justice organizations. Before and after graduating in 1977, Kingsolver lived and worked in Europe. In the early eighties, she pursued graduate studies in biology and ecology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she received a Masters of Science degree. She also enrolled in a writing class taught by author Francine Prose, whose work Kingsolver admires.

Kingsolver's fiction is rich with the language and imagery of her native Kentucky. But when she first left home, she says, "I lost my accent . . . [P]eople made terrible fun of me for the way I used to talk, so I gave it up slowly and became something else." During her college years and after living in Greece and France, she supported herself in a variety of jobs: as an archaeologist, copy editor, X-ray technician, housecleaner, biological researcher and translator of medical documents. After graduate school, a position as a science writer for the University of Arizona soon led her into feature writing for journals and newspapers. Her articles have appeared in dozens of newspapers and magazines in North America and abroad. In 1986 she won an Arizona Press Club award for outstanding feature writing, and in 1995, after the publication of High Tide in Tucson, Kingsolver was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from her alma mater, De Pauw University.

Kingsolver credits her careers in scientific writing and journalism with instilling in her a writer's discipline and broadening her "fictional possiblities." Describing herself as a shy person who would generally prefer to stay at home with her computer, she explains that "journalism forces me to meet and talk with people I would never run across otherwise."

From 1985 through 1987, Kingsolver was a freelance journalist by day, but she was writing fiction by night. Married to a chemist in 1985, she suffered from insomnia after becoming pregnant the following year. Instead of following her doctor's recommendation to scrub the bathroom tiles with a toothbrush, Kingsolver sat in a closet and began to write The Bean Trees, a novel about a young woman who leaves rural Kentucky (accent intact) and finds herself living in urban Tucson.

The Bean Trees, published by HarperCollins in 1988, and reissued in a special ten-year anniversary hardcover edition in 1998, was enthusiastically received by critics. But, perhaps more important to Kingsolver, the novel has never gone out of print and has been embraced by millions of readers throughout the world. "A novel can educate to some extent," she told Publishers Weekly. "But first, a novel has to entertain--that's the contract with the reader: you give me ten hours and I'll give you a reason to turn every page. I have a commitment to accessibility. I believe in plot. I want an English professor to understand the symbolism while at the same time I want the people I grew up with--who may not often read anything but the Sears catalogue--to read my books."

For Kingsolver, writing is a form of political engagement. When she was in her twenties she discovered Doris Lessing. "I read the Children of Violence novels and began to understand how a person could write about the problems of the world in a compelling and beautiful way. And it seemed to me that was the most important thing I could ever do, if I could ever do that."

The Bean Trees was followed by an oral history of a mine strike, Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 (ILR/Cornell University Press, 1989, 1996); a story collection, Homeland and Other Stories (1989); the novels Animal Dreams (1990), and Pigs in Heaven (1993); collected poems in Another America: Otra America (Seal Press 1992 & 1998); and the best-selling High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now and Never (1995). The Poisonwood Bible, (1998), earned accolades at home and abroad, including the National Book Prize of South Africa. It was finalist for the Pulitzer and PEN/Faulkner awards, and was an Oprah's Book Club selection. In 2000, Barbara was awarded the National Humanities Medal, our nation's highest honor for service through the arts.

Barbara's Prodigal Summer, released in November of 2000, is a novel set in a rural farming community of southern Appalachia. Small Wonder (2002), presents twenty-three essays that celebrate nature, family, literature, and the joys of everyday life while examining the geneses of war, violence, and poverty in our world. Also in 2002, the National Geographic Society published Last Stand: America's Virgin Lands, a collaboration between Kingsolver and award-winning photographer Annie Griffiths Belt.

Barbara Kingsolver lives with her husband Steven Hopp, and their two daughters, Camille (born in 1987), and Lily (1996). They divide their time between Tuscon, Arizona, and a farm in southern Appalachia. When not writing, Barbara gardens, cooks, and enjoys the outdoors with her family; works as an environmental activist and human-rights advocate, and plays hand drums and keyboard with her guitarist husband. Hopp and Kingsolver also co-write essays and articles on natural history, some of which appeared in Small Wonder.

Given that Barbara Kingsolver's work covers the psychic and geographical territories that she knows firsthand, readers often assume that her work is autobiographical. "There are little things that people who know me might recognize in my novels," she acknowledges. "But my work is not about me. I don't ever write about real people. That would be stealing, first of all. And second of all, art is supposed to be better than that. If you want a slice of life, look out the window. An artist has to look out that window, isolate one or two suggestive things, and embroider them together with poetry and fabrication, to create a revelation. If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread."

You can find other sample biographies by searching through www.authoryellowpages.com.