Jayel Gibson

Read interview with author on ReaderViews.com
Visit the author's website

Jayel Gibson was born in California, where she would spend much of her young life. As a child, Gibson listened to her grandmother spin stories of traditional Celtic folklore and fairy tales, which would later influence her in the direction of her own writing and storytelling. The sense of mythology fostered in Gibson drove her to eventually create the Ancient Mirrors Tales, a series of books that delve into an ancient, magical world where men live alongside dragons and wizards.

With a Bachelor of Arts and a Masters of Multicultural Studies, she became an elementary school teacher in 1989 in Escondido, Calif., where she taught the fourth and fifth grades. However, her passion for storytelling and research into Celtic and Anglo-Saxon cultures proved more enticing than grade school instruction, and she retired from teaching in 2003 to pursue writing full-time. The seedlings of her grandmother’s Celtic tales combined with the alternate worlds she had harbored in her own mind to form the Ancient Mirrors Tales.

While the reader is transported to a completely different place and time through Gibson's knowledge of ancient cultures, her books are also grounded in elements gleaned from the world of role-playing games, another of Gibson’s passions. The end result is a flawless melding of fantasy fiction and gaming. They come from very different traditions, but here the two go hand in hand.

Gibson currently resides in southern Oregon, with her husband, five pet sugar gliders—a small type of marsupial—and a Molluccan cockatoo. She is often featured at conventions and conferences, and can be found annually at BookExpo America, Wordstock, Oregon’s South Coast Writers Conference and Faerieworlds. She is currently at work on her next novel.