About Kaitlin O'Riley

Kaitlin O'Riley has always loved books and loved to read.

As a young girl growing up on the New Jersey shore (yes, she is a Jersey Girl and very proud of it) she spent hours and hours reading at the beach, reading out on the front porch, and reading in her bedroom very late at night when she was supposed to be sleeping. She would walk to the little public library in town and choose books as if they were delicious chocolates in a candy store. She read all the classic “girl” books: Little Women, as well as every other book written by Louisa May Alcott, the entire Anne of Green Gables series, and The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett. All of those stories took place in another time period, so different from her own life, and she found that very intriguing.

Kaitlin fell in love with historical romances when she was fourteen years old and first read Mistress of Mellyn, by Victoria Holt. Even before she devoured every single one of Holt’s books, Kaitlin was hooked on historical romance fiction. She then moved on to the likes of the novels by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss (Shanna and The Flame and the Flower) which she read stealthily, when her older sisters were not home to see that she was reading their books. However, her all time favorite book was, and still is, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. Now she adores the works of romance authors such as Eloisa James, Lisa Kleypas, Gaelen Foley, Julia Quinn, Julie Garwood, and Sabrina Jeffries.

Kaitlin’s love of reading translated naturally to a love of writing. She has written personal journals since she was fourteen and has adored every creative writing class she took in school. She actually wrote her first romances when she was fifteen, with her best friend. Sadly, they had no clue what they were writing about in those spiral notebooks, having no romantic experiences to draw from at the time. Luckily for her, those early efforts were tossed in a fireplace.

In college Kaitlin took a slight detour from writing and became a foreign language major, spending her junior year studying in Spain. And because stories of the past always intrigued her, she also studied history.

Although Kaitlin still spends a good portion of the year on the east coast, she now lives in sunny Southern California with her family, where she is busy writing her next novel!