Cinda Williams Chima Books in Order

If you want contemporary fantasy in a real-world setting: The Warrior Heir → The Wizard Heir → The Dragon Heir
If you want epic fantasy and court intrigue: The Demon King → The Exiled Queen → The Gray Wolf Throne → The Crimson Crown
If you want the next generation after Seven Realms: Flamecaster → Shadowcaster → Stormcaster → Deathcaster
If you want Norse mythology and a Viking world: Children of Ragnarok → Bane of Asgard

Cinda Williams Chima was born in Springfield, Ohio, and spent most of her life in Ohio before later settling in North Carolina. She has described herself as coming from a long line of fortune-tellers, musicians, and storytellers, with deep family roots in southern Ohio. That background matters, because her books often feel like they were built from both everyday life and old, half-whispered magic.

She started writing early.

As a kid, she was a daydreamer, and by grade school she was already writing poems. In junior high, she was writing romance novels in class, the sort that sometimes got confiscated by teachers. Books were a big part of home life, and she has spoken warmly about a mother who never treated reading as dangerous, only as a doorway into other worlds. She also has a twin sister, Linda, which somehow feels perfectly on brand for a fantasy writer.

For a long time, though, writing was not her main job. She worked her way through college, changed majors more than once, and eventually earned a degree in philosophy from the University of Akron. Later she went back to school for nutrition, completed further study in the field, and earned a master's degree in nutrition from Case Western Reserve University.

That led to a full professional life in health care and teaching. She worked as a clinical dietitian and held leadership roles at Cleveland Clinic and MetroHealth, where she directed clinical nutrition and helped establish a diabetes self-management program. She also wrote nutrition columns and personal essays, and from 2004 to 2009 she taught nutrition and dietetics at the University of Akron. It is not hard to see how that background fed her fiction. Her books may be full of magic, but people still get tired, scared, stubborn, and backed into corners in very believable ways.

Then writing came back in a bigger way after her children were born. She began by writing about family life, and one day sat down to try a novel. After years of revision, that manuscript became The Warrior Heir. From there came The Wizard Heir and The Dragon Heir, books that mix secret magical politics with modern teen life and helped establish her as a major name in young adult fantasy.

Then she went bigger.

With The Demon King and the rest of the Seven Realms quartet, Chima moved into large-scale secondary-world fantasy, full of court politics, clan loyalties, romance, betrayal, and arguments over who gets to hold power. Later, Flamecaster returned to that same world with a new generation and a darker wartime edge. With Children of Ragnarok, she took another turn, building a post-Ragnarok story shaped by Norse myth, runes, demons, longships, and the rough politics of survival.

Across all of these series, a few things show up again and again. She likes hidden worlds, dangerous bargains, old family secrets, and young characters who are asked to carry far too much. She is especially interested in power, who has it, who abuses it, and what it costs to push back. Whether the setting is contemporary Ohio or the mountain queendoms and islands of her fantasy worlds, her stories tend to focus on smart, pressured characters trying to keep their balance while everything around them shifts.

She now lives in North Carolina with her husband and their dog, Loki. She has also said she is working on an adult historical fantasy centered on Appalachian witches, which feels like a natural next step for a writer whose imagination has always been tied to family stories, regional folklore, and the stubborn pull of magic.