Sue monk kidd author biography templates
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Sue Monk Kidd
Sue Monk barn had written the first chapter of her bestselling book The Secret Life of Bees in the early s. The chapter focused on a girl with a bedroom full of bees, inspired by her childhood home. Originally, Kidd was told bygd a teacher at a conference that the piece did not have the potential to be a novel and should be adapted as a short story. But when Monk attended the National Arts Club in New York City a few years later, a literary agent encouraged her to adapt the story into a novel. The Secret Life of Bees, published in , is set in South Carolina during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, just after the signing of the Civil Rights Act of A ung girl, Lily, runs away from home with her Black housekeeper, Rosaleen, and finds refuge with three Black beekeeping sisters. The Secret Life of Bees spent more than two and a half years on the New York Times bestseller list. Like many of Monk’s other works, Bees tackles themes of gender, race, religion, and mental
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Sue Monk Kidd
Sue Monk Kidd was raised in the small town of Sylvester, Georgia, a place that deeply influenced the writing of her first novel The Secret Life of Bees. She graduated from Texas Christian University in and later took creative writing courses at Emory University and Anderson College, as well as studying at Sewanee, Bread Loaf, and other writers’ conferences. In , TCU conferred on her an honorary doctor of letters grad. She was inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors in and into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in
Her book When the Heart Waits, published by Harper San Francisco in has become a touchstone on contemplative spirituality. The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, also published by Harper in , describes Kidd’s journey into feminist theology, a memoir that had a groundbreaking effect within religious circles.
In her forties, Kidd turned her attention to writing fiction, winning the South Carolina Fellowsh
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Sue Monk Kidd was born on August 12, She grew up in Sylvester, a town in southwest Georgia where her family had lived for two centuries, on the same plot of land where her great-great-grandparents had lived. The stories her father invented for her as a child and the encouragement of her English teachers fueled her desire to become a writer, yet her uncertainty about her future as a writer, combined with the “cultural climate of the South in ,” prompted her to pursue a nursing career instead. She graduated from Texas Christian University in and spent the next decade working as a registered nurse and college nursing instructor. Also during that time, she met and married her husband, Sanford “Sandy” Kidd, and together they had two children, Bob and Ann.
Sue Monk Kidd was just shy of her thirtieth birthday when she finally turned again toward a writing career. She wanted to write fiction, and she enrolled in writing classes at a local college. Unexpectedly, her innate gift for writing