Jacqui Castle is a novelist living and writing in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Asheville, North Carolina. She is the 2020 Indie Author of the Year through the Indie Author Project(in collaboration with Library Journal and Biblioboard). Her debut novel, The Seclusion, is a Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award winner in Science Fiction and winner of the North Carolina Author Project. The sequel to The Seclusion, The Chasm, will be released on March 29, 2022.