Kaye Gibbons

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Kaye Gibbons (born May 5, 1960) is an American novelist from North Carolina. Her first novel, Ellen Foster (1987), won several prizes, including the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Special Citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation, and the Louis D. Rubin, Jr. Prize in Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman were named for Oprah's Book Club in 1998.

Gibbons grew up in Nash County, North Carolina, and attended Rocky Mount Senior High School. She studied American and English literature at North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has three daughters.

Gibbons has bipolar disorder and says she becomes very creative during manic phases, when she feels that everything is influenced by a kind of real magic; Ellen Foster was written during one of those times.

In 2008, Gibbons was arrested for prescription drug fraud after trying to obtain hydrocodone with a fraudulent prescription. She received a 90-day suspended sentence, two years of probation, and a $300 fine.