Ayana Gray (1993–)

Bestselling author Ayana Gray writes young adult (YA) and adult speculative fiction. Her work, which centers upon monsters, mythology, and magic, has been praised by Kirkus Reviews and Publisher’s Weekly, among others.

Lillian Ayana Gray was born on March 13, 1993, in Atlanta, Georgia, to Rhonda and Russ Gray. She has a younger brother, Corey, and a younger sister, Ashley. Gray grew up in Atlanta, where her maternal grandparents helped raise her for the first five years of her life. In 2006, when Gray was thirteen, the family moved to Little Rock (Pulaski County) when her father got a new job. She attended the private school Pulaski Academy. When she wrote about female infanticide and sex-selective abortion, using India and China as her references, the twenty-six-page research paper with its thirty-two-item bibliography was so well-written that it was published in the Concord Review.

Gray attended the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County). During her senior year, she did a one-month study abroad in Ghana, following the path of the transatlantic slave trade. She also took a college course on political violence that influenced her deeper understanding of good, evil, and power. She intended to become an immigration or civil rights lawyer but became disillusioned with the U.S. justice system. She started writing “just for fun.” She graduated from UA with a BA in political science and African and African-American Studies in 2015. That same year, Gray received the Rodney Momon Youth Award at the Northwest Arkansas Doctor Martin Luther King Council’s annual MLK Banquet and was honored as a Senior of Significance by the Arkansas Alumni Association.

She lived with her parents in Little Rock briefly and worked for the UA advancement division. She worked as a nanny for a year in Brisbane and Sydney, Australia, and then moved back to the States and worked in North Little Rock (Pulaski County) briefly. She then moved for a job at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

In Florida, Gray did not know anyone locally and got involved with the online writing community. In 2018, she found out about the hashtag #DVPit (which was created to give marginalized and underrepresented voices an opportunity to elevate their projects) and used its upcoming 2019 event as her personal deadline. Gray pitched her first book on Twitter, calling one of her main characters “Black Arya Stark.”

She focused on her writing from 2015 to 2019 and sold her book in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and the civil unrest of the Black Lives Matter protests. “There were people protesting outside my window,” said Gray. She wanted to join the protests but also did not want to get sick. Her dad told her, “Your power is in your pen,” and she realized that her writing would be her form of protest.

She got married in 2019; she and her spouse Dan were separated for a year during the pandemic due to the immigration process from Australia to America.

Gray worked on revision for a year with her agent Peter Knapp before connecting with editor Stacy Barney and publisher Penguin Random House. Her YA novel Beasts of Prey entered the New York Times bestseller list in 2021 at number four and earned a number of “Best Book Pick” designations that year; by 2025, it had been translated into ten languages across five continents. Gray told Maiysha Kai in an interview for TheGrio’s Writing Black podcast, “I think about the power of books and how…the words [authors] wrote made me feel seen, and made me feel less alone….What I hoped is that Beasts of Prey could be a life raft for one person, if it helped one person get through a hard time, helped one person feel seen, and feel like, ‘Wow, I’m not the only one who’s had this difficult experience,’ then I’ve won. Everything else is the cherry on top.”

The other installments in her YA trilogy were Beasts of Ruin (2022) and Beasts of War (2024). They were published by Putnam Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Penguin Random House. The books are set in a Pan-African fantasy setting and center around two Black teens, Koffi and Ekon. As a kid, Gray loved fantasy novels and wanted to see herself reflected in those stories and imagined herself and her friends in those settings. Gray was inspired by the story of the Tsavo man eaters—two male lions who hunted together, killing railroad workers in Kenya and Uganda—presented in the 1996 movie The Ghost and the Darkness.

As a young person she also loved Greco-Roman mythology and portrayed that pantheon as Black people: Black Zeus and Black Athena. Her stories are “inspired by heavily researched traditional mythologies across the African continent,” because she did not know until she was an adult that Africa had its own mythologies. She placed so-called Easter eggs in her work: teen readers could research the names of monsters or the names of authors mentioned and realize she was pulling from real African stories and histories. She also chose to use the Swahili language rather than making one up. Gray says she wrote her books in part so that Black kids could see themselves reflected on the page as main characters.

In 2022, Gray became the youngest person to receive the Young Alumni Award from the Arkansas Alumni Association. “When I get the chance to talk to students, what I emphasize is ‘Don’t give up on your dreams,’” said Gray. “It took me five years to write my first book…I’m so glad I didn’t give up on it.” Beasts of Prey was chosen for the 2022 Arkansas Center for the Book Selection and the 2022 Georgia Center for the Book Selection. In 2023, the trilogy was chosen as the featured series for the event, “If All Arkansas Read the Same Book.”

Gray announced that her fourth novel, I, Medusa, was written for adults and would come out on November 18, 2025. Meanwhile, Beasts of Prey is being adapted by Netflix for film. Gray and her spouse live in Little Rock.

For additional information:
“A Way with Words.” University of Arkansas. https://determined.uark.edu/a-way-with-words.php (accessed August 27, 2025).

“Arkansas Author Finishes Bestselling Trilogy.” THV 11. https://www.thv11.com/article/news/local/arkansas-author-bestselling-trilogy/91-b047b7b6-d13c-4087-82bb-f4ef0ea02088 (accessed August 27, 2025).

Ayana Gray. https://www.ayanagray.com/ (accessed August 27, 2025).

Clancy, Sean. “On the Hunt.” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, September 26, 2021, pp. 1E, 6E. Online at https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2021/sep/26/on-the-hunt/ (accessed August 27, 2025).

Eifling, Sam. “Beast of a Time.” Arkansas Times (August 2022): 89–90, 92. Online at https://arktimes.com/rock-candy/2022/08/02/beast-of-a-time-a-qa-with-ayana-gray (accessed August 27, 2025).

“First Draft Episode #325: Ayana Gray.” First Draft, September 30, 2021. https://www.firstdraftpod.com/episode-transcripts/2022/1/13/ayana-gray (accessed August 27, 2025).

Hightower, Lara Jo. “Ayana Gray.” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, December 12, 2021, pp. 1D, 5D. Online at https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2021/dec/12/ayana-gray/?features-profiles (accessed August 27, 2025).

Kai, Maiysha. “Take a Dive into an All Black Fantasy World with Ayana Gray.” Writing Black. https://thegrio.com/videos/blackpodcastnetwork/1320390/ (accessed August 27, 2025).

J. Jobe
CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas