Michaela Riley

Michaela Riley writes at the intersection of myth and memory, a space where the past doesn’t stay buried and survival always costs something.

Based in Williamsburg, Virginia, she has spent years tracing the threads of her ancestral heritage through genealogical research and along the winding trails she hikes with her German Shepherd, Morrigan, and terrier mix, Carlos. What she found (patterns of sacrifice, fractured identity and hard-won endurance repeating across generations) became the foundation of The Witch’s Rebirth, an eight-book dark historical fantasy saga woven from Celtic mythology and real European history.

Her fiction doesn’t borrow from mythology; it excavates it. The death-and-rebirth cycle at the heart of Merona’s story, from a witch burning in 1590 Copenhagen to the warring queens of Merovingian Francia, comes directly from Michaela’s reckoning with what her ancestors endured and what they passed forward. The Virginia trails she walks are not the backdrop to her stories. They are the labyrinth itself.

An 11-time award-winning author, honored with the Readers’ Favorite Silver Award, First Place for Fantasy at BookFest and the Best Book Awards for Horror, Michaela also writes dark suspense and crime thrillers through the same unflinching moral lens, including Critics’ Requiem and Dark Scales of Justice.

Books 1–4 of The Witch’s Rebirth are available now, including her latest release, The Gambit of Queens.