Sue Monk Kidd

Sue Monk Kidd had two careers in her life. Born on Aug. 12, 1948 in Sylvester, Georgia, she graduated from nursing school in 1970 and had an 18-year career as a Registered Nurse and a nursing instructor at the Medical College of Georgia. She married Sandford Kidd (he preferred to be called Sandy) and had two children: Bob and Ann. Her writing career had a humble beginning, with her first having an essay published in Guideposts Magazine, a publication that had a very strong spiritual and Christian bent. Reader's Digest reprinted it in 1988. After it was accepted, she later joined the staff as a contributing editor. She wrote a couple of Christian memoirs in the '90s as well as a book on feminist theology and then she published her first novel, The Secret Life of Bees, in 2002. The book centered on the Civil Rights Movement in '64 and was later adapted for both stage and screen. She wrote a second novel, The Mermaid Chair, that was turned into a Lifetime movie. In January of 2014, she came out with another novel The Invention of Wings, which concerned slavery through the story of abolitionist Sarah Grimke; this novel reached No. 1 on the New York Times Bestseller List.