GREENCASTLE, Ind., April 28, 2006 - "The North Carolina Festival of the Book started off with a slam Thursday night as a standing-room-only crowd prompted guards to shut the door of the cavernous Duke Chapel so Barbara Kingsolver could deliver the festival's keynote address," begins an article in today's News & Observer of Raleigh-Durham. Peder Zane writes, "Those lucky enough to squeeze inside heard the best-selling author of novels including The Poisonwood Bible and Prodigal Summer deliver an impassioned speech about the connections between art and politics. Literature, Kingsolver said, is a 'tool for changing the world.'" Barbara Kingsolver is a 1977 graduate of DePauw University.
Zane reports that Kingsolver told her audience that "she tries 'to engage with the world's broken promises' by telling stories that address racism, sexism, imperialism and other forces that place 'limits on hope'... Through these fictions she tries to create bonds of empathy between readers and characters who live in worlds different from their own. More than just moving her fans emotionally, Kingsolver said, she hopes her work will 'move them, possibly, to political action.'
 Another article by the Associated Press reports, "Writers should embrace the idea that their work is political rather than running from the label, novelist Barbara Kingsolver said. In fact, some of the best writing is political, she said mentioning Snow Falling on Cedars, about the interment of Japanese-Americans during World II, and others, including The Color Purple by Alice Walker and Cider House Rules by John Irving."
Kingsolver, who majored in zoology at DePauw, tells the AP, "Because of this climate in the U.S. that political art is taboo, the writers will tell you it's not political. I've heard John Irving say he's not a political writer. There is nothing to be worried about. It's absolutely the domain of art."
 Kingsolver created and personally funds the Bellwether Prize for Fiction, the only major North American endowment or prize for the arts that specifically seeks to support a literature of social responsibility. At yesterday's event she announced the 2006 winner, Hillary Jordan, who receives $25,000 "and a contract with Scribner publishing house for her unpublished novel, Mudbound. It tells the story of the contempt that greeted African-American veterans who returned to the Mississippi Delta after serving their country during World War II," the News & Observer points out.
Read more in the story headlined "Author Fills Duke Chapel" at the newspaper's Web site. The AP article can be accessed at the Charlotte Observer.
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