About

Jen Hayley was born and raised in small town Tennessee, went to college nearby in another small town, then figured she’d try something new. She packed up her bags and moved to New York City, and has been having adventures ever since. To feed her love of internet technology, she has worked at an online media company and gotten her MBA in Information Systems. But Jen’s biggest love has always been books and writing, and she now lives and writes just across the Hudson in Jersey City with her two tiny cats, Kiki and Kali.

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I have always been a reader. In fact, I can’t remember a time in my life when I wasn’t. My parents were always happy to buy me books, and I remember some of my favorite days were when a trip to the bookstore was on the agenda. In the small town where I grew up, we didn’t have a Barnes & Noble or a Borders. So, it was only on special occasions that I got to visit a building that housed rows upon rows of books.

While I have always enjoyed writing, I didn’t begin to take it seriously until after graduating college. It was the summer of 2006 that I made my first attempt at completing a novel. It wasn’t until spring of 2008 that I finally found a book I could write and finish. That manuscript will always be important to me, but I’ve hidden it under my bed for now. It taught me how to write a book, but it needs a lot of work to see the light of day.

The next book idea came to me when I was half-asleep. It was a story I absolutely loved, and I finished the first draft rather quickly. Determined, I attended AgentFest in July to pitch several top-notch agents hoping to get requests for material. Miriam Kriss of the Irene Goodman Literary Agency was the very first agent I pitched that day, and I remember being very nervous and more than a little flustered. She requested the full and, a few months later, offered representation for MY SO CALLED AFTERLIFE, my first young adult urban fantasy.