Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1976 (?)
• Raised—Berkeley, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Wellesley College; J.D., Stanford University
• Currently—lives in Oakland, California
Jasmine Guillory is an American lawyer and author. Her novels include The Wedding Date, published early in 2018, followed by The Proposal in the fall of the same year. Both books became bestsellers.
Raised in Berkeley, California, Guillory was ingrained early on with a passion for politics, especially after watching the 1991 Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill Congressional hearings. She was further inspired by a beloved seventh-grade teacher, only ten years her senior, who left teaching to pursue a law degree. Her teacher's decision solidified Guillory's own career dreams.
After college and law school, Guillory practiced law for eight years. Yet, as she recounted to Catapult, she found she wanted something more:
After I’d been a lawyer for about eight years, I found myself longing for some sort of creative outlet. The repetitive, structured, spreadsheet-oriented nature of my work often made me feel stifled.
And so Guillory turned to writing fiction, even though she had never considered herself a writer, let alone an author—people whom she had always thought of as solitary and lonely. But Guillory loved to read, (according to family legend, she was reading at the early age of three), so she decided to try her hand at novel writing.
Guillory knew the kind of novels she wanted to write: stories about smart young black girls living in a city. To prepare herself, Guillory spent a year or more reading books about writing and reading novels to suss out the methods of character and plot development. Eventually, once her writing muscles felt strong enough, she put them to work on a romance novel, the novel we know as The Wedding Date. (Adapted from online sources, including Catapult. Retrieved 11/28/2018.)