Jay has been an educator for 22 years. When she completed her BA in Secondary Education/English, she initially started teaching American and Multicultural Literature (later Shakespeare) in public high school in Gilbert, Arizona at the same school where she graduated. She mentored with her high school English teacher and credits two of her high school English teachers: Ms. Paulette Foley and Ms. Michelle Fleming as the ones who instilled in her a great love of literature.
After teaching in Arizona for ten years, she moved to Tokyo, Japan to teach at international school and later moved to a private Japanese school. While there, she got her MA in TESOL. She has taught literature and Shakespeare to Japanese, Korean, and Indian students as well as students from around the world (entirely in English) for the past ten years.
Jay’s journey to becoming a published author has not been a short one. Studying writing in community college made her want to be an author. After receiving rejection letters from publishers, she decided to focus on her teaching career. Picking up her writing career where she left off so many years ago wasn’t easy, but she started writing again seriously in 2016. She completed her first novel, A Year of Rain, in 2020.
She’s currently working on her vampire series Hunters & Prey. The first two books Blood Like Water and Drawn to Blood are on KU.
You can find her YA debut, The Opal Queen, at online retailers now.
You can find her first foray into sci-fi, Fugitive Zero (out now) and A Shadow of Blue (coming soon)!
