Born in Northern California with adventure in her DNA, Ashley Mayers traveled to thirty-five countries before the age of thirty. She spent her childhood and adolescence dreaming of being an explorer from the safety of her suburban bedroom, reading fantasy novels, and singing opera. Luckily, Ashley exhibited talent in each of these areas and she was accepted to Stanford University with a music scholarship and a humanities research fellowship.

While in college, Ashley enjoyed an in-depth humanities education including courses taught by world-renowned experts in drama, music and literature ranging from ancient classical theatre to Shakespeare to Italian opera. In parallel, she started a lifelong effort to gain diverse international experiences, ranging from manual labor on an archeology dig in Sicily to studying abroad at Oxford University.

Upon graduating at the top of her class from Stanford with Honors and Distinction, Ashley pursued a seemingly unexpected career path and joined Google as an advertising strategist. Continuing with her quest for world travel and cultural awakening, she went to India for six months where she trained large Google teams in Hyderabad and Delhi and traveled extensively around India and Southeast Asia, discussing culture, religion and politics with a large, diverse group of international friends and colleagues. She was so in love with the region that she eventually moved to Singapore where she worked as a regional leader at Google, traveling between Singapore, Australia, Japan, China, Malaysia, India and California extensively and blogging along the way. But, eventually home called her back, and Ashley returned to California and became a Marketing Director for a tech company in the San Francisco Bay Area.

After several years and many more countries, Ashley continued her journey by taking a wild road trip across the jungles of South India, creating her own digital consulting firm, and combining her extensive cultural experiences with her love of fantasy literature to create her first book series, THE SITA CHRONICLES and the follow-up prequel series THE GLORIOUS VICTORIES OF ELEANOR MACLEOD, also published by Grass Roof Publishing. 

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In this pandemic world, Ashley is forever grateful that the process of writing a million word modern epic allowed her to fully embrace and understand her own capacity to find meaning in the face of adversity. She is also grateful that the extensive research and passion that went into writing her book series allows her to engage with her Gujarati husband, in-laws, and daughter with a depth of appreciation and knowledge of their culture that is unusual for a firang. The beauty of open-minded cross-cultural exchange are ever-present in her life as much as they are in her books, and she hopes that readers will be inspired to have new conversations exploring the wonders of human diversity as often as possible. 

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