Jay Emby is a Minneapolis-based writer, editor, husband, and father.
He studied creative writing at Florida State University. During those years, he wrote a lot of short fiction, but one story he never quite finished was a little fable about a creature who knew only darkness until something coaxed him into the light. The idea kept growing over the years—and it’s still growing.
Though Jay still loves writing short stories, he has always felt most at home in the novel—and increasingly, in the possibilities of a full series, where characters can grow and evolve over the course of a long journey, and readers can grow alongside them.
As a reader, Jay has never felt bound to a single genre. He grew up reading John Saul’s dark, psychologically driven novels and loving the classics, particularly Jules Verne’s swashbuckling Around the World in Eighty Days. The Lord of the Rings first drew him into fantasy, immersing him in a world of extraordinary depth and detail. Later, The Hunger Games trilogy showed him how a story of enormous scope could move with relentless forward momentum. More recently, he has explored science fiction through The Expanse and Red Rising series.
Jay hopes to create stories that let readers lose themselves in another world, become invested in its struggles and its future, and return to their own world inspired to see things a little differently. If he is doing the job he set out to do, the Great Bay is no longer just his world. It’s also yours.
The Gringum King and the Realm of Light is his first novel and the first book in The Gringum King Chronicles. The second installment, The Gringum King and the Wall of Fire, is coming soon.