Get to Know Claire

New York made her. It didn’t finish her.

Claire Ashford is a New Yorker. She has lived in the city her whole life. She started writing romance—and the sex in it—because the books she could find still treated desire as something that belonged to people in their twenties. She was past that, and she was not done.

“I was tired of being told the heat was over,” she says. “I knew what my body was doing at fifty. The books did not.”

The work is female-centric on purpose. The women on the page are not discovering sex. They have jobs, children, a commute, rooms that already have a life in them. The heat is written from inside that, not as a show for someone younger.

Cross and Rose is her first series.

She has two children. Before the books she had a regular job and a regular commute. She still takes the train. She writes in the morning.