Kaye Gibbons

Kaye Gibbons is an American novelist from Nash County, North Carolina, best known for Ellen Foster, her first novel, which appeared in 1987 and won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. Her later novel A Virtuous Woman follows a young widow in the rural South who forms a steady partnership with a tenant farmer. Two of her books were picked for Oprah's Book Club in 1998, and she has spoken openly about living with bipolar disorder and the creative energy she finds in its manic phases.