American author Kaye Gibbons was born Bertha Kaye Batts and grew up in North Carolina in a small home with no electricity or running water. She attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she studied literature. She began working on the idea that would become Ellen Foster through sketches around the character of Starletta years earlier but finished the manuscript for Ellen Foster when she was 26. She later revealed that elements of the novel were autobiographical; her father had an alcohol addiction, and her mother died by suicide when she was 10. After her father’s death, the author eventually found a home with her older brother, David, and his wife. She married her first husband, Michael Gibbons, in 1984.

Gibbons’s other novels include A Virtuous Woman (1989), A Cure for Dreams (1991), Charms for the Easy Life (1993), Sights Unseen (1995), On the Occasion of my Last Afternoon (1998), and Divining Women (2004), along with a sequel to Ellen Foster, The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster (2005). Many of the novels explore themes of family relationships, particularly between mothers and daughters; the struggle of poverty; and the enduring harm of racism. Gibbons has also written about her diagnosis of bipolar disorder in her book Frost and Flower: My Life with Manic Depression So Far (1995).