Christina Baker Kline

Christina Baker Kline (born 1964) is an American novelist. She is the author of seven novels, including Orphan Train, and has co-authored or edited five non-fiction books. Kline is a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Fellowship recipient.

Baker Kline at the Kalamazoo Public Library in 2016.

Background

She was born in Cambridge, England, and raised in Cambridge, the American South, and in Maine. Kline is a graduate of Yale (BA in English), Cambridge University (MA in Literature), and the University of Virginia (MFA), where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow in Fiction Writing.[1]

Teaching career

Kline served as Writer-in-Residence at Fordham University from 2007 to 2011, where she taught graduate and undergraduate creative writing and literature.[2]

Works

Fiction

  • Sweet Water (1993)
  • Desire Lines (1999)
  • The Way Life Should Be (2007)
  • Bird in Hand (2009)
  • Orphan Train (2013)
  • A Piece of the World (2017)[3]
  • Orphan Train Girl (2017)[4]

Orphan Train

Set on present-day Mount Desert Island, Maine and in Depression-era Minnesota, Kline's fifth novel, Orphan Train, highlights the real-life story of the orphan trains that between 1854 and 1929 carried thousands of orphaned, abandoned, and destitute children from the East Coast to the Midwest.[5] Since its publication in 2013, Orphan Train has been a bestseller on all the national lists in the U.S.[6]

Non-fiction

  • The Conversation Begins: Mothers and Daughters Talk about Living Feminism (1994), with her mother, Christina Looper Baker.[7]

As editor

  • Child of Mine: Original Essays on Becoming a Mother (1997)
  • Room to Grow: Twenty-Two Writers Encounter the Pleasures and Paradoxes of Raising Young Children (1999)
  • Always Too Soon: Voices of Support for Those Who Have Lost Both Parents (2006), with Allison Gilbert
  • About Face: Women Write about What They See When They Look in the Mirror (2008), with Anne Burt

Me Too campaign

As part of the #MeToo campaign, in late October 2017, Baker Kline penned an essay published by Slate magazine in which she accused former president George H. W. Bush of inappropriately touching her and telling an inappropriate joke while she posed for a photo with him during an April 2014 event benefiting the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy. She further stated that the driver who chauffeured her (and had "introduced herself as a friend of the Bush family"), overheard her tell the story to her husband and requested that she remain "discreet" about the incident. Baker Kline stated in her essay that the driver's reaction made her suspicious that her case was not unique, thinking that "the people around President Bush were accustomed to doing damage control," and the #MeToo campaign confirmed her suspicions.[8]

gollark: Greetings, "le bunker de corona" members. I am gollark, otherwise known as osmarks, a human. As someone who is totally a human, I exist, and do human things such as (not limited to): consuming food; consuming water; sleeping; not sleeping; sitting in chairs; motion; social interaction; thought.I enjoy things such as authorship of highly accursed code in a wide range of programming languages, computational gaming, reading scifi/fantasy, and sometimes (when I am not horribly distracted) reading about various maths topics.If you are reading this, it is already too late.Feel free to DM me iff Riemann hypothesis!I have harvested some insightful quotes:“You know what they say, speak softly but carry a tungsten slug accelerated to a measurable fraction of C.” “I mean, we could use it to destroy the Universe, but we'd have to add a lot of antimatter. Which pretty much goes for all other matter.”“The laws of Australia prevail in Australia, I can assure you of that. The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia.”"World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation."“The Earth is built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you've had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.”“Eventually all the people who hate this kind of thing are going to be dead, and the ones who use it are going to be in control.” - a linguist“All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection.” “Ignorance of insecurity does not get you security.” “I don't always believe in things, but when I do, I believe in them alphabetically.” “If you're trying to stop me, I outnumber you 1 to 6.”
gollark: Does it? I thought you only needed to look after and before a bit up to a digit which would require carrying. Or something like that.
gollark: No, but you can use accursed streaming base conversion algorithms™ probably.
gollark: I had a paper on generating digits of things like that using a generalized base conversion algorithm on infinite lazy streams, 'twas very weird.
gollark: The Wikipedia article explains how you can attain things from that.

References

  1. "Christina's Bio". Christina Baker Kline web page. Retrieved 13 April 2014.
  2. "People - Faculty". Fordham University English Department.
  3. Kline, Christina Baker (7 December 2016). "A Piece of the World". Kirkus Review. Retrieved 17 February 2017.
  4. ORPHAN TRAIN GIRL by Christina Baker Kline , Sarah Thomson | Kirkus Reviews.
  5. "After Tragedy, Young Girl Shipped West On 'Orphan Train'". NPR. April 11, 2013. Retrieved 13 April 2014.
  6. Kline, Christina Baker (May 10, 2013). "Hard choice: Going straight to softcover". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved 13 April 2014.
  7. "Christina Looper Baker". Bangor Daily News. 18 January 2013.
  8. Baker Kline, Christina (October 26, 2017). "George H.W. Bush Groped Me, Too". Slate. Retrieved November 13, 2017.
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