Ashley Herring Blake Books in Order

If you want adult queer rom-coms: Delilah Green Doesn't Care → Astrid Parker Doesn't Fail → Iris Kelly Doesn't Date
If you want a cozy holiday second chance: Make the Season Bright
If you want small-town Hollywood chaos: Dream On, Ramona Riley → Get Over It, April Evans
If you want tender, intense YA: How to Make a Wish → Girl Made of Stars → Suffer Love
If you want middle grade with big feelings: Ivy Aberdeen's Letter to the World → The Mighty Heart of Sunny St. James → Hazel Bly and the Deep Blue Sea

Ashley Herring Blake has built a career writing love stories and coming-of-age stories that make room for messy feelings. She writes for adults, teens, and middle grade readers, and across all three shelves she keeps returning to queer identity, family, grief, and the quiet work of figuring yourself out. Readers often come for the romance and stay for the way her characters are allowed to be flawed, funny, and still deeply worth rooting for.

She has said she was always writing, poems and little stories as a kid, but she did not really believe she could do it professionally until after 30. At that point she decided to go after fiction for real, and her first published novel, Suffer Love, arrived in 2016.

Before and alongside books, Blake's life included teaching. She holds a master's degree in teaching, and she has spoken about working in education in coastal Georgia. That background helps explain why her school-age characters feel like actual kids and teens, not mini adults delivering speeches.

She began publishing in young adult because those were the stories she was reading and connecting with at the time. Just as important, she wanted to add queer books for teens who needed them. Later, she turned to middle grade for a similar reason, saying those books would have meant a lot to her when she was younger.

Middle grade, she has said, was her first love.

That affection shows up clearly in Ivy Aberdeen's Letter to the World, her breakout middle grade novel about a tornado, a lost notebook, and a first crush. The book earned a Stonewall Honor and helped introduce many readers to Blake's blend of tenderness, ache, and hope. She followed it with The Mighty Heart of Sunny St. James and Hazel Bly and the Deep Blue Sea, two novels that look at identity, healing, and the ways kids carry big emotions. Blake has said that Hazel Bly and the Deep Blue Sea grew out of her own grief after losing her mother in 2012.

Her young adult books push those questions a little further. How to Make a Wish and Girl Made of Stars deal with first love, consent, trauma, and the hard parts of growing up, while still making room for warmth, humor, and connection. Girl Made of Stars went on to become a Lambda Literary Award finalist.

When she moved into adult fiction, she has said she was ready to write characters dealing with the kinds of problems closer to her own present life. She also wanted more queer romance in the world.

That shift produced books like Delilah Green Doesn't Care, Astrid Parker Doesn't Fail, Iris Kelly Doesn't Date, Make the Season Bright, and the Clover Lake novels that begin with Dream On, Ramona Riley. In those stories, Blake brought the same emotional honesty to sapphic rom-coms full of banter, friendship, and people learning how to let themselves be known. She has said that Astrid's later-in-life queer awakening was close to her own experience, which helps explain why even the funniest books in her catalog still have real vulnerability under the jokes.

That emotional thread never really changes.

Her stories keep circling back to complicated parents, chosen family, first crushes, and grief that shifts shape over time. Off the page, her official bio is pleasingly specific: she loves coffee, cats, melancholy songs, and happy books. She has also mentioned a fondness for arranging books by color and for cold weather, and she now lives with her family on a very tiny island off the coast of Georgia.