The event will be held at Bellarmine University's Cralle Theater in the Wyatt Center for the Arts. This is a ticketed event. Lettered tickets will provide admission to the event, and will be used to organize the book signing afterwards. Tickets are available now at both Carmichael's locations and are free with the purchase of The Lacuna or any book by Barbara Kingsolver.
The event is Sunday, November, 4pm, at Bellarmine's Cralle Theatre.
Although born in Maryland, Barbara Kingsolver grew up in Carlisle, Kentucky where her father was the only doctor in Nicholas County. She spent her entire childhood in rural Kentucky except for the year her family moved to a central African village, a setting she later used for her beloved and best-selling novel, The Poisonwood Bible.
The Lacuna, her first work of fiction in nine years, is a sweeping historical novel that begins in the 1930s Mexico of painters Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and the exiled Leon Trotsky and ends in the United States during the Red Scare of the late 1940s. The protagonist is the gay son of a Mexican mother and an American father who becomes a best-selling author and national literary star. But his celebrity and his Mexican friends also make him a target for J. Edgar Hoover's FBI in its relentless and misguided search for communists, which hit artists and foreigners especially hard. In its review of The Lacuna, Publishers Weekly raved that Kingsolver "masterfully resurrects a dark period in American history with the assured hand of a true literary artist."
Matthew Gilbert of the Boston Globe dubbed Barbara "the Woody Guthrie of contemporary American fiction" because her writings, both fiction and nonfiction, frequently have an underlying social theme. Her most recent book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is a chronicle of the year she and her family spent growing all their own food on a farm in Virginia. It is a compelling argument in favor of local food and the kind of community that local economies create. To honor Barbara's commitment to local food, Carmichael's is donating 10% of ticket sales to the Kentucky nonprofit Community Farm Alliance.
For details, contact Carmichael's at 896-6950.
