Sherrilyn Kenyon
Biography
Early years
Childhood
Sherrilyn Kenyon was born in Columbus, Georgia while her father was stationed at Ft. Benning, GA. Kenyon’s father abandoned the family when she was eight (he returned to the family her senior year of high school), leaving her mother to raise Kenyon, her younger brother, and her older sister, Trish, who has severe cerebral palsy, alone. Kenyon’s brother was sent to live with their grandparents in Atlanta, Georgia while Kenyon stayed in Columbus to help care for her sister. After 18 months of separation, the family was reunited when Kenyon and her mother and sister moved to Atlanta also. Kenyon’s first recognition for her writing came when she won a contest in third grade by writing an essay about her single mother for Mother’s Day and it was followed a year later when she won a DAR Award for a historical story she wrote about a girl living in Colonial Virginia.
Kenyon was raised in the middle of eight boys, but only two of them were actually her brothers. The other six were her cousins who, due to family crisis, lived with her family off an on most of her early life and young adulthood. She also has two older sisters.
Even as a child Kenyon knew that she wanted to be a writer as it provided her an escape from an abusive childhood. She is a big advocate against child abuse and participates in fundraisers to help other victims. In kindergarten, she wrote in her Brownie manual that she wanted to be a writer and a mother when she grew up. Yet neither of those ever came easy for her. At age seven she wrote and illustrated her first novel, Sharron’s Secret, a horror story about a girl who uses her psychic powers to kill her brothers and takeover her school. At fourteen Kenyon