Meet the author

Hi, I'm Leah!

I'm Leah (“lay-uh”—yes, like the princess/general), and I believe magical stories have the power to make the world a brighter place. So I write clean, immersive, hope-filled romantic fantasy (“romantasy”) with authentic heroines and heroes who find the light inside despite the darkness around them—and, of course, find love and fantastical adventure along the way.

Every series I write will always have a happy ending. Believe me, I get enough of the other kind in real life.

I've been spinning stories since before I could write them down. One of my earliest memories is of worrying my babysitter because I'd gone quiet in a corner, lost in a daydream—my childhood nickname could just as easily have been “Earth to Leah.” The moment I had a keyboard and an email address, I started sending serial novels to my siblings and my best friend, beginning with a fantasy retelling of Robin Hood. They were my first audience, and I'm still grateful.

I grew up devouring fantasy. I loved J. K. Rowling like everyone else, but I found my true home in the worlds of Gail Carson Levine, Tamora Pierce, Mercedes Lackey, Christopher Paolini, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien. All through high school I carried a fantasy novel everywhere and disappeared into it every chance I got.

I'm a dreamer, but I'm also stubbornly practical—the great paradox of my character. Wary of the starving-artist cliché, I went looking for a “real” career and landed on editing: if I couldn't yet live off my own writing, I could at least help shape other people's. At Brigham Young University, I majored in English language and minored in editing and modern Hebrew, started editing by my sophomore year, helped charter our chapter of what's now the LDSPMA, and spent a semester as editor in chief of BYU's science-fiction and fantasy journal, Leading Edge.

I followed that editing plan for seven years, reading and writing my favorite genre on the side, until I couldn't ignore the call any longer. At the start of 2023, as much as it terrified me, I left a secure, well-paying job to write full time. It turns out you can make a living as a writer; it just takes a lot—a lot—of hard work. So far, every bit of it has been worth it. I'm certain this is one of the things I was meant to do. So here goes everything.

Writes

Clean romantic fantasy

Series

Blood of the Covenants

Promise

Always a happy series ending

Based in

The DC area

A note on faith

My beliefs

I'm a Christian. Specifically, I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I share that openly because my faith is the core of who I am; no honest introduction would be complete without it. It informs everything I do and hope to become, and that includes my writing.

At the same time, I respect and admire every faith that tries to better its followers, give people hope, and do good in the world—I believe there is light to be found in all of them. Naming my own beliefs is never a way of putting anyone else's down. If you've found your greatest light in another faith, I'm genuinely glad for you.

I feel the same goodwill toward agnostics, atheists, and anyone for whom religion is a painful or complicated subject. So much harm has been done in the name of good, and I understand if that has tarnished your belief in a greater good entirely. I deeply respect any decision about belief that comes from a place of integrity and honest searching.

All I ask is that we meet each other with curiosity and compassion, setting aside labels and the assumptions that come with them, willing to hear one another's stories and the reasons we are who we are.

Why do I believe? Because I have had too many experiences for my integrity to deny of something greater and better than myself, looking out for every living being and loving them with a love that I, as a fallible mortal, can hardly imagine. That love—the love of my Savior and my Father—has changed me in ways nothing else could. It has healed me, lifted me, and made me kinder than I would otherwise have been.

Far from closing me off, my faith is what opens me up. It is the reason I can see every living being as infinitely precious, find truth and value in other perspectives, and hold on to hope for this world. It gives me the strength to bloom, the courage to reach for the sun, and the endurance to weather the storm. Whatever you believe or don't, I wish you the very best that life has to offer. The very best.

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