Shelly Ellis

Author

For as long as she could remember, Shelly Ellis (who also writes under the name, Shelly Stratton) has wanted to be a writer. In college, she studied journalism and started out as a crime reporter for a small local newspaper. Now she is an editor at a trade journal in Virginia.

Her fiction writing career began when she became one of four finalists in the BET Books First-Time Writers Contest when she was 19 years old. The prize was having her first short-story romance published in the book, All That and Then Some!

Her first novel, The Right Maneuver, debuted in April 2011 and her second, A Love Built to Last, was released in November 2011 and nominated for the African American Literary Award in the romance category. Shelly started her women’s fiction series with Kensington Publishing in 2013. The series earned a starred review from Publishers Weekly for the first novel in the series, Can’t Stand the Heat, and a 46th annual NAACP Image Award nomination for the Gibbons Gold Digger novel, Another Woman’s Man.

She lives in Prince George’s County, Maryland with her husband and their daughter. She loves to paint, read, and watch movies.