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 her love for a man overwhelmed her love of the romantic expat life, and after some time, 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 and drama to create her first novel, RED SAPPHIRE. Ashley now resides in San Francisco with her husband and her dog, planning her next international adventure, running her marketing consultancy, and writing the next several books of THE SITA CHRONICLES.