Celia Ashley

Celia Ashley aka Robin Maderich is an author of historical romance set in locales from Colonial America to India. The mother of three grown sons who are out on their own, the author is a history buff who makes her home with her husband and a menagerie of pets in a tiny, rural village in Pennsylvania. Not coincidentally, Pennsylvania is the setting for her latest romance, a contemporary paranormal entitled Midnight Hearts. Always willing to stretch herself in new directions, she welcomed the shift from historical to contemporary settings. Ms. Maderich has been published in historical romance under her own name and by the pseudonym Alyssa Deane. However, in the spirit of change, she writes contemporary novels under the pen name Celia Ashley.

Ms. Maderich spent her childhood enamored by art and history and books, and by the power of words, determining at a very young age to write. Her first "book" was a thirty-two page story about a little girl and her horse (naturally), complete with illustrations and written when she was in the second grade. From that point, she began the task of teaching herself the craft of writing, reading a book the first time for pleasure, the second and subsequent times in study of the manner in which words were threaded into tapestries of prose. She received an offer for her first novel at the age of twenty-eight and subsequently turned it down. However, from that rather risky beginning, she was requested to try her hand at writing a romance novel and Faith and Honor was born, published by Warner Books (before the merger with Time) in 1989. Now, still writing romance, she happily finds herself a member of the NCP family.