Sherrilyn Kenyon

Sherrilyn Kenyon (born December 11, 1965) is an American writer. Under her former married name, she wrote both urban fantasy and paranormal romance. She is best known for her Dark Hunter series. Under the pseudonym Kinley MacGregor she writes historical fiction with paranormal elements. Kenyon's novels have sold over 70 million copies in print in over 100 countries. Under both names, her books have appeared at the top of the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and USA Today lists, and they are frequent bestsellers in Germany, Australia, and the United Kingdom.

Sherrilyn Kenyon was born on 11 December 1965 in Columbus, Georgia. The fourth child in a family of five children, her parents, Harold and Malene Woodward, divorced when she was eight, at which point she lived with her grandparents. She describes her childhood as defined by abuse and poverty, but she remained close to her mother, who encouraged and shared her interest in horror, the paranormal and science fiction.

Kenyon started writing while in high school, in part as therapy to escape other aspects of her life. She went to Georgia College in the 1980s, and there she met her future husband, Lawrence Kenyon. They married in 1990, and they moved to Jackson, Mississippi, while he studied law. Although money was already tight, after their first child was born and he graduated they lost their house, subsequently forcing them to live out of their car until they were able to secure an apartment some months later.

Once in an apartment, Kenyon was able to return to writing. Previously, Kenyon had published her first story in 1975, and in the mid-1980s she was a writer for the science fiction magazine Cutting Edge. She had sold a number of books in the early 1990s, prior to the birth of her son, but her big break came in 1999 when the first two books of her "Dark-Hunter" sequence were picked up by St. Martin's Press as part of a three-book deal. She had started the series with short stories that she had written in 1984, and had started development on the novels in 1986, but it took until the late 1990s before she had the opportunity to complete them.

On January 7, 2019, Kenyon filed a lawsuit against her husband and his assistants, claiming they had poisoned her over a number of years in order to sabotage her health for his financial gain. After her husband filed for divorce in March 2018, the suit alleges that tests concluded her levels of lithium, tin, barium, thorium and other metals were at a dangerous level of toxicity, indicating that they had "systematically poisoned her since 2015". However, the test results had not been interpreted by a toxicologist. Her husband's statement about the lawsuit called her "a brilliant fiction writer who has made it apparent that she cannot discern between fiction and reality". She dropped her lawsuit on July 26, 2019.

Novels and short stories may be listed repeatedly because many of her series share the same fictional universe.

Each sub-set of the series is marked by the type of creatures the novel is about.

Notes: Begun as Kinley MacGregor. Continuing as Sherrilyn Kenyon.