Sherrilyn Kenyon

Sherrilyn Kenyon was born on December 11, 1965, in Columbus, Georgia. She grew up in a large, difficult household, raised mainly by her mother alongside an older sister who has cerebral palsy and several brothers and cousins who lived with the family at different times. Severely dyslexic, she nevertheless knew from early childhood that she wanted to be a writer, selling her first short story at fourteen and later studying history at the University of Georgia after her dyslexia ruled out a planned degree in journalism.

She began developing the vampire-hunting mythology that became her Dark-Hunter series in the mid-1980s, while writing a serial for a small science-fiction magazine called The Cutting Edge.

Her fiction career took shape through the 1990s despite a string of personal setbacks, including the death of her father in 1995 and a high-risk pregnancy that kept her out of work for an extended period.

In the late 1990s, at her publisher's request, she began writing historical romance under the pseudonym Kinley MacGregor to keep it distinct from her paranormal fiction, while continuing to build the Dark-Hunter world under her own name.

The Dark-Hunter series, launched in the early 2000s, became her best-known work and made her a multiple New York Times bestselling author; her novels have sold more than 70 million copies in over 100 countries. She has three sons and lives in Peachtree City, Georgia.