Biography of Sue Monk Kidd

Sue Monk Kidd was born and raised in the tiny town of Sylvester, Georgia. Her writing has been deeply influenced by her hometown, and she mined her experiences of growing up in Sylvester as she wrote The Secret Life of Bees, which was her her first novel. Sue discovered her longing to be a writer when she was a child listening to her father’s imaginative stories. In school, she was encouraged by English teachers who described her as a "born writer." She began writing her own stories, as well as keeping prolific journals that recorded her experiences, both internal and external,this was a practice she has continued throughout her life. In college, She majored in nursing and graduated in 1970 from Texas Christian University with a B.S. degree, then worked throughout her twenties as a registered nurse on surgical and pediatric hospital units and as a college nursing instructor. During that time, she married Sanford (Sandy) Kidd, a graduate student in theology, and they had two children, Bob and Ann. Shortly before Sue turned thirty the pull to writing returned. She was living in Anderson, South Carolina where her husband Sandy was teaching at a small liberal arts college. She enrolled in writing classes wanting to write fiction, but was soon changed to non-fiction when a personal essay she wrote for class was published in Guideposts Magazine and reprinted in Readers Digest. Wanting to help support her family, she began a career as a freelancer, writing personal experience articles, most of them inspirational and art of living pieces. Sue found immediate success as a freelancer, becoming a Contributing Editor at Guideposts. In 1997 she began writing her first novel, The Secret Life of Bees, and worked on it for the next three and a half years. I was published by Viking in 2002, it became a genuine literary phenomenon. A powerful story of coming-of- age, race-relations, the ability of love to transform our lives and the often unacknowledged longing for the universal feminine race. The novel tells the story of a fourteen year old girl, Lily, who runs away with her black housekeeper in 1964 in South Carolina and the sanctuary they both find in the home of three  beekeeping sisters.  The Secret Life of Bees has sold more than 3.5 million copies, and spent over eighty weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and been published in more than 20 languages. Sue began writing her second novel, The Mermaid Chair in 2002, completing it in 2004, and was published in the Spring of 2005. Today, Sue lives beside a salt marsh near Charleston, South Carolina with her husband Sandy and their black lab, Lily. She writes in a book-lined, upstairs study where she can look out at the tidal creeks and marsh birds. She is at work on a new book.