About
Amanda Jean Kelly writes contemporary and erotic romance. She was born in Manhasset, New York and raised on Long Island and in the Tampa Bay, Florida area. She comes from a family of artistic types. Her father, James Martin Kelly, is an accomplished musician and actor and has guest-starred on shows like NYPD Blue, The Shield and Drew Carey Show, to name a few.
Amanda currently writes under the pen name Cassidy Kent, along with her co-writer Jax Crane. As friends and neighbors, they quickly discovered that their love for romance and writing made for a great collaboration. In March of 2006, their second writing effort, Santa’s Helper, won the Amber Quill Heat Wave Contest. They were one of eleven winners chosen out of over 200 manuscript entries and received a two-year e-publishing contract. Two weeks later, they followed up with Sunset Key, their third project and subsequent winner of the Phaze Surge Heat Sheet Contest. Since then, they have collectively released seven e-published novellas and three print anthologies will be released in 2007.
Amanda has also won several essay-writing scholarships, including the Clearwater Junior Women’s Association Scholarship, and the Sam Walton Scholarship. She received a full artistic scholarship to Southern Methodist University where she focused on vocal studies and writing related college courses, including Fiction and English Literature. As an avid romance fan, she has read hundreds of novels, from contemporary to historical and everything in between.
She was classically trained in vocal music for five years and has sung in English, French, Spanish, Russian, German, Italian and Latin. Over the years, she has appeared in theatre productions such as Evita, Kiss Me Kate, Showboat, The Crucible, Murder on the Nile and Carmina Burana.
Amanda currently lives with her graphic designer fiancé, Paul, in the North Hollywood Arts District. She hopes to one day travel to Ireland, the home of her ancestors, but for now she works in Corporate America and finds solace in writing romance.