About the Author
Breshea (/Bri/-/ʃeɪ/) is a Fantasy author from Cleveland, Ohio with a penchant for penning stories full of magical realism, romance, and adventure centering BIPOC characters.
Growing up, Breshea loved to disappear into books; she would dive into their pages and drink with an insatiable thirst to know every word. Unfortunately, during adolescence, Breshea found it difficult to engage with the stories she read in school. She loved literature, but the characters always seemed distant and unfamiliar, their lives and stories existing in stark contrast to her own. Similarly, the “urban” and “black” novels pushed onto her by her teachers and peers left Breshea craving a certain authenticity that she didn’t find in stories that fed on performative blackness and reproduced tragedy.
Breshea found books, as readers often do, but none of them sated her need. Throughout middle, high school, and college, Breshea spend time writing Fanfiction online and reveling in the ability to guide the characters along and bend their identities until they were closer to hers. This desire to breathe life into characters and the hunger for representative fantasy literature drove Breshea to search for women who had done what she dreamed. Octavia Butler. Nnedi Okorafor. Justina Ireland. Their stories made her brave. Brave enough to create characters that spoke to the experience of black girlhood while weaving a fantastical tale.In 2016, after graduating with her M. Ed from Bowling Green State University, Breshea self published her debut novel, A Shrouded Spark during her first year of teaching. The story followed Noni Grace Carter as she struggled to reconcile developing otherwordly abilities and the consequences and danger that came with her power. The Noni and the God Tree series was born.
Since then, Breshea has published A Shattered Truth and Burden and Betrayal, respectively the sequel and prequel to A Shrouded Spark. Her work is often inspired by her students and the decade she spent analyzing literature, searching for the stories that represent her students best and speak to their experiences.
Breshea lives with her daughter and family in Cleveland, Ohio, where she teaches in a small suburb. Breshea reads voraciously and lives for music, naps on rainy afternoons, spooky movies with her little. She hopes to one day live in a world where every reader can pick up a book and find a piece of them peering back from the pages. She believes that every identity deserves representation, and that reading helps develop empathy and appreciation for others and their differences.