Kaitlyn Sage Patterson Books in Order

If you want the full story: The Diminished → The Exalted
If you like political fantasy: The Diminished → The Exalted
If you want the emotional setup first: The Diminished
If you are ready for the payoff: The Exalted

Kaitlyn Sage Patterson grew up in East Tennessee, outside the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, with what sounds like a classic future-writer habit: always having a book close by. She was also horse-mad from the start. She has said she began asking to ride as soon as she could talk, and by the time she was ten she was mucking stalls to earn extra lesson time.

Books and barns show up again and again in her life.

She studied creative writing in college and later earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Memphis. For a while, though, writing fiction did not feel like the obvious road. Patterson has said she originally thought teaching might be the practical plan, but after graduate school, and later a move to South Korea to teach English, she found herself circling back to the kinds of stories she had loved as a kid. She began pursuing novel writing in earnest in 2013.

That path led to The Diminished, her debut novel, published in 2018, and The Exalted, which followed in 2019. The two books make up the Alskad Empire Chronicles, a YA fantasy story built around a sharp idea: in this world, nearly everyone is born with a twin. Readers who click with the series tend to like the mix of court politics, rebellion, faith, and family secrets, but also the fact that the emotional center stays close to Bo and Vi, two teens trying to figure out who they are in a system built to tell them.

She likes big worldbuilding, but she keeps it personal.

Patterson has said that history, myth, and sibling relationships all feed her fantasy work. Power, belonging, and the rules a society invents to keep itself going are recurring questions in The Diminished and The Exalted. Even when the stakes get large, empires, coups, and resistance movements, the characters are usually wrestling with very human problems: grief, duty, loneliness, love, and the fear of not fitting the role handed to them.

She has also spoken about growing up at the foot of the Smokies and about the way Appalachian storytelling, community, resistance, and resilience shaped her. She has credited poets such as Lucille Clifton, Emily Dickinson, Effie Waller Smith, and Nikki Giovanni as influences, which helps explain why her books can be broad in scale while still paying close attention to mood and feeling.

More recently, she has also moved into middle grade fiction, bringing her lifelong horse knowledge with her. Those books trade royal intrigue for barns, friendship, and everyday determination, but the through line is familiar: kids trying to claim space for themselves in worlds that can feel closed off. The stories lean on practical horse detail and on the same sympathy for dreamers and outsiders that runs through her fantasy.

These days, she still seems to live at the meeting point of writing and horses. She has spoken about balancing books with a full-time job, riding, and a busy home life, and she has said that going to the barn before writing helps her settle in. She also still enjoys cooking, keeps tea nearby, and talks warmly about the partner, animals, and horse-filled routine that shape her days. For Patterson, imagination has never been far from ordinary work, and that may be part of what makes her stories feel lived in.