Sue Monk Kidd Biography

Sue Monk Kidd is an American writer best known for her 2001 novel The Secret Life of Bees. She is also known for her work in The Invention of Wings, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, The Mermaid Chair, Traveling with Pomegranates:A Mother-Daughter Story, among others.

Sue Monk Kidd Age

She was born on August 12, 1948 in Sylvester, Georgia, United States. She is 74 years old as of 2022.

Sue Monk Kidd Height

Kidd stands at an average height of about 5 feet 6 inches tall.

Sue Monk Kidd Family

Kidd was born in Sylvester, Georgia, United States to her loving parents Leah and Ridley Monk, her father was an imaginative, story-teller who encourage her to pursue her writing career.

Sue Monk Kidd Husband

Kidd is married to Sanford “Sandy” Kidd, and the couple have two children, Bob and Ann. Kidd resides in Florida with her family. She previously lived in Charleston and Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina.

Sue Monk Kidd Net Worth

Kidd has an estimated net worth of about $1 million to $5 million.

Sue Monk Kidd Education

Kidd attended Texas Christian University where she graduated with a B.S. in nursing in 1970. In her twenties, Kidd worked as a Registered Nurse and college nursing instructor at the Medical College of Georgia. She was influenced in her 20s by the writings of Thomas Merton to explore her inner life.

In her 30s, Kidd took writing courses at Emory University and Anderson College in South Carolina, now Anderson University, as well as studying at Sewanee, Bread Loaf, and other writers’ conferences.

Sue Monk Kidd Christian

Kidd grew up as a member of the Southern Baptist but later on as she grew up she changed and chose  “divine feminine,” as her religion thought she has not quite explained what it is all about.

Sue Monk Kidd Author

Kidd got her start in writing when a personal essay she wrote for a writing class was published in Guideposts and reprinted in Reader’s Digest. She went on to become a Contributing Editor at Guideposts.

Kidd’s first three books were spiritual memoirs describing her experiences in contemplative Christianity, the last telling the story of her journey from traditional Christianity to feminist theology.

Her book God’s Joyful Surprise: Finding Yourself Loved (Harper SanFrancisco, 1988) is focused on abandoning a hopeless quest for perfection and accepting one is loved as one is.

When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life’s Sacred Questions (Harper SanFrancisco, 1990) tells of her painful midlife crisis and the third The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman’s Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine (Harper SanFrancisco, 1996), discussed her encounter with women’s spirituality.

Kidd’s first novel, The Secret Life of Bees (2002), is set during the American civil rights movement of 1964, telling the story of a white girl who runs away from home to live with a woman who now works as an independent bee-keeper and honey-maker with many of her sisters.

The novel has been adapted as a play in New York by The American Place Theater. It was also adapted as a movie of the same name by Fox Searchlight, starring Queen Latifah, Dakota Fanning, Jennifer Hudson, Alicia Keys and Sophie Okonedo.

Her second novel, The Mermaid Chair (2005), won the 2005 Quill Award for General Fiction. It tells a story concerns a woman who upon coming home to an island off the coast of South Carolina becomes attracted to a Benedictine monk who is just a few months short of taking his final vows.

The title refers to a chair in his monastery carved with mermaids dedicated to a female saint said to be a mermaid before her conversion and who is patroness of the island. The novel was adapted as a 2006 Lifetime movie of the same name.

In 2006, Firstlight, a collection of Kidd’s early writings, was published in hardcover by Guideposts Books, and it was published in paperback by Penguin in 2007.

After traveling with her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor, to sacred sites in Turkey, Greece, and France, Sue Monk Kidd and Taylor co-authored a memoir, Traveling with Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story. It was published in 2009 by Viking, and it appeared on numerous bestseller lists, including the New York Times list and has been published in several languages.

Kidd’s 2014 novel, The Invention of Wings, is set during the antebellum years and based on the life of Sarah Grimké, a 19th-century abolitionist and women’s rights pioneer. The novel debuted at No. 1 on The New York Times Best Seller list and was later selected for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0.

In April, Kidd appeared in an interview with Oprah on OWN’s Super Soul Sunday episode.

Sue Monk Kidd Books | Sue Monk Kidd Novels

• This Is the Day, 1987
• God’s Joyful Surprise: Finding Yourself Loved, 1988
• When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life’s Sacred Questions, 1990
• Love’s Hidden Blessings: God Can Touch Your Life When You Least Expect It, 1990
• The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman’s Journey from Christian
• Tradition to the Sacred Feminine, 1996
• The Secret Life of Bees, 2001
• The Secret Life of Bees , 2002
• The Mermaid Chair, 2005
• A Luminous Presence: One Woman’s Awakening to the Inner Life, 2005
• Firstlight: The Early Inspirational Writings of Sue Monk Kidd, 2006
• Come and See, 2008
• Traveling with Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Journey to the Sacred Places of Greece, Turkey and France (with Ann Kidd Taylor). Viking, 2009
• The Secret Life of Bees: Mit Audio-CD und Klausurvorschlägen / by Gerhard
• Zimmer. Teacher’s manual, 2012
• The Invention of Wings, 2014
• The Invention of Wings: A 30 Minute Chapter by Chapter Summary & Review, 2014
• The Sue Monk Kidd Spiritual Sampler: Excerpts from The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, When the Heart Waits, and a Special Letter to Readers from Sue Monk Kidd, 2016

The Secret Life Of Bees By Sue Monk Kidd

The Secret Life of Bees is a book by Sue Monk Kidd. Set in 1964, it is a coming-of-age story about loss and betrayal. The book received critical acclaim and was a New York Times bestseller. It won the 2004 Book Sense Book of the Year Awards, and was nominated for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction.

Originally published: 8 November 2001
Author: Sue Monk Kidd
Genre: Fiction
Original language: English
Adaptations: The Secret Life of Bees (2008)
Characters: Lily Owens, August Boatwright, June Boatwright, Rosaleen Daise, T Ray Owens

Sue Monk Kidd The Invention Of Wings

From the celebrated author of The Secret Life of Bees, a #1 New York Times bestselling novel about two unforgettable American women.
Writing at the height of her narrative and imaginative gifts, Sue Monk Kidd presents a masterpiece of hope, daring, the quest for freedom, and the desire to have a voice in the world.

Hetty “Handful” Grimke, an urban slave in early nineteenth century Charleston, yearns for life beyond the suffocating walls that enclose her within the wealthy Grimke household. The Grimke’s daughter, Sarah, has known from an early age she is meant to do something large in the world, but she is hemmed in by the limits imposed on women.

Kidd’s sweeping novel is set in motion on Sarah’s eleventh birthday, when she is given ownership of ten year old Handful, who is to be her handmaid. We follow their remarkable journeys over the next thirty five years, as both strive for a life of their own, dramatically shaping each other’s destinies and forming a complex relationship marked by guilt, defiance, estrangement and the uneasy ways of love.

As the stories build to a riveting climax, Handful will endure loss and sorrow, finding courage and a sense of self in the process. Sarah will experience crushed hopes, betrayal, unrequited love, and ostracism before leaving Charleston to find her place alongside her fearless younger sister, Angelina, as one of the early pioneers in the abolition and women’s rights movements.

Inspired by the historical figure of Sarah Grimke, Kidd goes beyond the record to flesh out the rich interior lives of all of her characters, both real and invented, including Handful’s cunning mother, Charlotte, who courts danger in her search for something better.

This exquisitely written novel is a triumph of storytelling that looks with unswerving eyes at a devastating wound in American history, through women whose struggles for liberation, empowerment, and expression will leave no reader unmoved.

Originally published: 7 January 2014
Author: Sue Monk Kidd
Genres: Historical Fiction, Biographical Fiction
Nominations: Goodreads Choice Awards Best Historical Fiction, Audie Award for Fiction