Dan Bonser was born in 1976 in Bangs, Texas, and has nurtured a lifelong passion for writing and photography. Growing up just miles from Cross Plains, where Conan creator Robert E. Howard lived and is now buried less than fifty yards from Dan’s grandmother, the pull toward sword and sorcery came early. Alongside the Dragonlance Chronicles, The Sword of Truth by Terry Goodkind, and the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan, those early reads helped shape his love for character-driven, high-stakes storytelling. After escaping Texas in his early twenties, Dan spent eleven years in North Carolina, where he discovered what it meant to be in love, and find peace with the world. It was there he also encountered the works of George R.R. Martin, Jacqueline Carey, and Laurell K. Hamilton. Though he had been writing for years and always knew he wanted to be a writer, it was during this time that he began to grasp the true scope of the stories he wanted to tell. Now married to his brilliant (and already published) wife, Lisa, and having made a few failed attempts to join the middle class, Dan returned to college in his late thirties. Writing, once a lifelong hobby, became a deeper release, a way to process both joy and hardship. He began writing The Ballad of the Emerald Bard for a blog. Though the blog saw only modest success, the story ignited something lasting, and he committed to creating a book series he could be proud of. Dan has been writing with imaginative flair since the early 1980s and has never stopped. From poetry to epic fantasy, he’ll continue telling stories as long as he’s able, sharing his dreams with anyone who might need them.