Barbara Kingsolver in Conversation with Winners of the Pen/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction at ASU

Sept. 25, 2012. Appalachian State University’s Belk Library and Algonquin Books are thrilled to announce an exciting event with bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver in conversation with two winners of the Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and senior editor Kathy Pories. This event will take place on Tuesday, Oct. 2 at 7 p.m. on the ASU campus (Broyhill Events Center, Helen Powers Ballroom).

The Bellwether Prize, which was established in 2000 and is maintained through a generous endowment by Barbara Kingsolver, promotes fiction that addresses issues of social justice and the impact of culture and politics on human relationships. This award is now administered by PEN American Center.

The Bellwether Prize recipients include Donna M. Gershten’s Kissing the Virgin’s Mouth in 2000 (HarperCollins); Gayle Brandeis’s The Book of Dead Birds in 2002 (HarperCollins); Marjorie Kowalski Cole’s Correcting the Landscape in 2004 (HarperCollins), Hillary Jordan’s Mudbound in 2006 (Algonquin Books), Heidi W. Durrow’s The Girl Who Fell from the Sky in 2008 (Algonquin Books), and Naomi Benaron’s Running the Rift in 2010 (Algonquin Books). The newest winner, Susan Nussbaum’s Good King, Bad King, is publishing in 2013 (Algonquin Books).

This event will include Bellwether Prize winners Hillary Jordan and Naomi Benaron in conversation with Barbara, alongside the Bellwether Prize editor from Algonquin Books, Kathy Pories. Barbara Kingsolver praised Running the Rift as “truly fearless writing: ambitious, beautiful, unapologetically passionate. Culturally rich and completely engrossing.” And she hailed Mudbound as “storytelling at the height of its powers: the ache of wrongs not yet made right, the fierce attendance of history made as real as rain, as true as this minute. Hillary Jordan writes with the force of a Delta storm.”