An American novelist and non-fiction writer, she is best known for The Poisonwood Bible (1998), a novel about a missionary family that moves to the Belgian Congo. She also received attention for her 2007 non-fiction work, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which details her family's experiment of eating only locally-grown food. She studied classical piano and biology at DePauw University in Indiana and went on to receive a Master's degree in evolutionary biology and ecology from the University of Arizona. She published her debut novel, The Bean Trees, in 1988.