Ashley Herring Blake is an award-winning American romance author dedicated to telling stories of queer people, and particularly bi women. She is an openly bi woman herself.
She is the author of the romance novels Delilah Green Doesn’t Care, Astrid Parker Doesn’t Fail, Iris Kelly Doesn’t Date, and Make the Season Bright, which are for adult readers. Her young adult works include Dream On, Ramona Riley, Suffer Love, How to Make a Wish, and Girl Made of Stars, while her middle grade titles feature Ivy Aberdeen’s Letter to the World, The Mighty Heart of Sunny St. James, and Hazel Bly and the Deep Blue Sea. She also co-edited the young adult romance anthology Fools in Love. She lives with her family on a small island off the coast of the state of Georgia.
Queerness in general, and bisexuality in particular, play a significant role in her work. Ashley Herring Blake likes to write about chaotic, messy, and real bi women to make sure her bi readers — adults and teens alike — see that they are not alone in this world. As a bi woman, she primarily writes about women.
In her interview with PopSugar, she explained her youth and how she perceived sapphic representation:
I had a religious background that kept me from seeing a lot of truths, or even looking for them for myself. I’m bisexual, so it was kind of easy to be like, well, I like guys too, so I can just ignore this part that I don’t know how it fits into my Christian upbringing. And therefore, I didn’t even really explore it, I didn’t look for it. I dropped that veil, because I don’t have that anymore. And I’m not religious at all. Then I started looking. I was 36 when I read a book for the first time that had a bisexual character in it, which is quite old to see that for the first time. They definitely existed; there was Annie on My Mind and Rubyfruit Jungle. There were definitely books out there that [explored queerness], but I didn’t really know to look for them.
She also said that when she started writing adult literature after writing for teenagers, she felt that adult literature was “way behind”,
She explained that, for her, bringing bi characters in her books is not repetition, but a way to show how different bi people are:
It was important to me to have a main bisexual character in every book. […] But I think that the way that I wanted to showcase those identities was just — even if the three bisexual women do share that identity — the way they present themselves, the way they walk through the world, and the way they experience that identity is very different. We say very often that this group of people, whoever it might be — this race, ethnicity, sexuality — is not a monolith. We all have varying experiences that we bring to it. We have different ways we have come out. We have different ways we have figured it out.
Ashley Herring Blake is a rare example of a modern author who speaks about her experience not just as queer person, but specifically as bi.
When she announces a new book, she often specifies on her Instagram whether it includes bi characters and bi pairings. On her Instagram page, she has also wished her readers a happy Pride and called herself a “local bisexual disaster author”. This is just one of the many examples of how she presents herself as a loud and proud bi person.