Cerella Sechrist

I’m Cerella, a fiction author writing sweet and wholesome contemporary romances. I live in York county, Pennsylvania, where I was born and raised. I have two adorable pugs (Charlotte and Darcy, named after Jane Austen literary characters.) One of the first questions people usually ask me is how to pronounce my name (surreal-ah). The next question is usually, “What does it mean?” (It’s Latin for “of the spring”, though I was born in the autumn, which is my favorite season.) My mom found it in a baby name book, and since I was the firstborn, my dad let her have her way with naming me. At the age of ten, I decided I wanted to be a writer. I wrote my first book, a historical novel, at the age of sixteen and began submitting to publishers at the age of seventeen. Thirteen years (and a healthy pile of rejection letters) later, I still wasn’t published. So I decided to take a break from the historicals I loved and write something the absolute opposite – a sweet, modern-day romantic comedy in a setting less than an hour’s drive from my own hometown: Hershey, Pennsylvania. After several submissions, chocolate bribes, and another couple of years, I was finally offered a contract for my first published novel, Love Finds You in Hershey, Pennsylvania. In the years since Hershey was published, I’ve been writing for Harlequin’s Heartwarming line. With Heartwarming, I’ve had the pleasure of setting stories in Hawaii, Paris, and a series in a lovely little fictional Chesapeake Bay town, Findlay Roads. (You can see them all on the Books page!) When I’m not writing, I keep myself pretty busy. I work part-time at Starbucks, as a barista, and also in the office of my family’s small construction business. I’m currently attending college at Arizona State University online through the Starbucks College Plan to earn my bachelor’s degree in Mass Communication and Media Studies (with a minor in History, always my favorite subject!) I write because I believe stories matter. Stories, both real and imagined, have the power to change lives. What we leave behind when we pass from this life, is our stories. I love reading them, writing them, and hearing about them.