Commencement Part 1 - Columbia College SC, May 2, 2009

Sue Monk Kidd and her daughter Ann Kidd Taylor 98 delivered the keynote address for Columbia Colleges undergraduate commencement on May 2, 2009. Kidd is the award-winning and bestselling author of the novels The Secret Life of Bees and The Mermaid Chair, and the acclaimed memoirs When the Heart Waits and The Dance of the Dissident Daughter and Firstlight, a collection of early writings. The Secret Life of Bees became a major motion picture by Fox Searchlight in October 2008. Each of Kidd's novels has been translated into more than twenty-two languages.

Ann, an alumna of Columbia College, has followed her mothers footsteps to become a writer. "My time at Columbia College was life changing. As a graduate, I can't imagine a more wonderful honor than being asked back as a commencement speaker," says Ann. She has recently collaborated with her mother on a new book to be released in 2009, Traveling with Pomegranates, a mother-daughter memoir. It chronicles a series of pilgrimages they made together through Greece, France, and Turkey beginning the summer that Ann graduated from college and Sue turned fifty. Ann was looking for a way to cross into young womanhood and I was seeking a way into older womanhood. Our journeys turned out to be powerful initiations. We captured those passages as well as the metamorphosis of our own mother-daughter relationship, says Sue.

Sue is Writer in Residence at The Sophia Institute in Charleston, and lives beside a salt marsh in Mt. Pleasant, near Charleston, with her husband Sandy and their black lab, Lily. Ann also lives in Mt. Pleasant with husband, Scott, and son Ben.

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