Carissa Broadbent

Carissa Broadbent is an American fantasy romance writer who built her readership the independent way: she began self-publishing in 2017, starting with A Palace Fractured, while working a day job in cybersecurity marketing. That self-published run included her debut trilogy, The War of Lost Hearts (2020-2022), an epic-fantasy romance about a con artist with forbidden magic who bargains her way into a brutal magical academy to save her people — a series that quietly built a devoted following years before her breakout. That breakout came with Crowns of Nyaxia, a dark, sensual vampire-fantasy series told in linked two-book duets, beginning with The Serpent and the Wings of Night (2022) and its enemies-to-lovers pairing of a human raised by a vampire king and the exiled vampire warrior she's forced to rely on. Its success, first on BookTok, then in a deal with Tor/Bramble that brought her earlier catalog to a much wider audience, made Broadbent one of romantasy's defining current names, known for blood-soaked court politics and a slow-burn romance that earns its heat. New readers should start with The Serpent and the Wings of Night; The War of Lost Hearts is a separate, unconnected world worth returning to afterward. Broadbent now writes full-time from Rhode Island, with Crowns of Nyaxia still ongoing toward its concluding volume.