Sue Monk Kidd, author of the highly acclaimed memoirs The Dance of the Dissident Daughter and When the Heart Waits, has won a Poets & Writers award, a Katherine Anne Porter Award, and a Bread Loaf scholarship. Two of her short stories--including an excerpt from The Secret Life of Bees-- were selected as notable stories in Best American Short Stories. The Secret Life of Bees was nominated for the prestigious Orange Prize for fiction in England.

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.