Ashley Poston

Ashley Poston grew up in rural South Carolina, where, as she has said herself, you can see the stars impossibly well. That sense of wonder never really left her writing. After earning a BA in English from the University of South Carolina, she moved into the publishing industry, working on marketing strategies for novels before eventually turning her full attention to her own fiction. These days she writes full-time, splitting her time between South Carolina and New York, with plenty of bookshop stops in between.

Her earliest published work appeared in the Radio Hearts series, beginning with The Sound of Us in 2013. Young adult fiction kept her busy for several years after that, and her Once Upon a Con series - starting with Geekerella in 2017 - earned her a devoted readership among fans of fandom culture and classic fairy-tale retellings. The series transplanted familiar stories into the glittery, chaotic world of fan conventions, and Geekerella earned a nomination for one of the year's most prominent YA fiction awards. The Princess and the Fangirl followed in 2019, then Bookish and the Beast in 2020, rounding out a trio of warm, witty retellings built around the fictional in-universe sci-fi franchise Starfield.

Science fiction entered the picture with the Heart of Iron duology. Heart of Iron (2018) drew on the story of Anastasia and filtered it through a crumbling solar system, rebel crews, and found-family dynamics. Its sequel, Soul of Stars, followed in 2019. The series demonstrated that Poston's instinct for romantic tension and sharp banter translated just as well to starships as it did to convention floors.

The shift to adult fiction with The Dead Romantics in 2022 marked a turning point. The novel - which follows a ghostwriter who can literally see the dead and must navigate grief, creative block, and an unexpected new editor - became a Good Morning America Book Club pick and a New York Times Book Review Best Book. It also landed on People Magazine's Best Books of the 2020s list. The adult debut proved that Poston's particular blend of emotional warmth, light magical realism, and self-aware humour could resonate just as strongly with grown-up readers.

The Seven Year Slip arrived in 2023 and cemented her place on the bestseller lists: the story of a book publicist who discovers her late aunt's Manhattan apartment lets her slip back and forth in time, colliding with a man living seven years in the past. It accumulated hundreds of thousands of reader ratings and received a nomination for a major romance award that year. A Novel Love Story followed in 2024, this time sending an English professor quite literally into the world of a beloved romance novel - a meta, clever premise that Publishers Weekly described as reminiscent of Stranger Than Fiction.

Sounds Like Love arrived in 2025, weaving magical realism around the music industry, and The Someday Garden was published in June 2026. A further novel, Eyes Like Stars, is due in July 2026, a release pace that reflects just how prolific she has become since making adult romance her primary home.

Across all her work, Poston's signature is consistency of feeling rather than consistency of genre. Whether the setting is a sci-fi spaceship, a fairy-tale forest, or a contemporary New York apartment haunted by grief and old love letters, her stories tend to circle the same preoccupations: how people carry loss, what fandom and story mean to those who find identity in them, and the specific, stubborn hope of a well-earned happy ending. Her prose is warm and conversational, and the magical elements in her adult novels function less as plot mechanics and more as emotional amplifiers - ways of making the interior life of her characters visible on the page.