Jasmine Guillory Books in Order

If you want her connected rom-com universe: The Wedding Date → The Proposal → The Wedding Party → Royal Holiday → Party of Two → While We Were Dating.
If you like workplace and California settings: Drunk on Love → While We Were Dating → Party of Two.
If you prefer fairy-tale retellings: By the Book is a standalone starting point in the Meant To Be collection.
If you want queer romance: Flirting Lessons works on its own, but hits even harder after Drunk on Love.
If you are curious about her short fiction: My Dear Friend Janet → Drop, Cover, and Hold On for a quick sampler of her style.

Jasmine Guillory grew up in Oakland, California, in a family that treated books as everyday essentials. She spent countless hours in local libraries, reading widely and quietly imagining stories of her own.

She left the Bay Area for Wellesley College, where she studied history, then headed to Stanford Law School. After graduation she worked in Washington D.C., clerked for a federal judge in San Francisco, and built a career as a lawyer focused on complex business and intellectual property work.

For years writing was a side project that fit into the corners of a busy legal life. In 2015 she signed up for National Novel Writing Month, drafted half a manuscript about two strangers stuck in an elevator, and realized this was the kind of problem solving she wanted most.

That NaNoWriMo draft eventually became her debut novel, The Wedding Date, published in 2018. Later the same year she released The Proposal, a Dodgers-stadium romance that went on to hit the New York Times paperback bestseller list and land in a major book club pick, bringing her work to a huge new audience.

From there she kept writing contemporary romances that share a loose universe of friends, siblings and coworkers. The Wedding Date series now includes books like The Wedding Party, Royal Holiday, Party of Two and While We Were Dating, each centering a new couple while letting familiar characters wander in and out of the story.

Guillory also enjoys experimenting outside that core group. With By the Book she reimagines a Beauty and the Beast style fairy tale inside the publishing world. Drunk on Love takes readers to a family winery in Napa Valley, and Flirting Lessons is her first full-length queer romance, following two women whose flirtation turns into something deeper.

In shorter work she co-wrote the Southern Belle Insults stories with Keke Palmer, about a magical wig and an unforgettable Southern alter ego, and contributed the bakery-set novella Drop, Cover, and Hold On to the Improbable Meet-Cute collection. These pieces keep the same focus on everyday settings, quick-witted dialogue, and characters who are allowed to be messy on the way to happiness.

Across her books, Guillory is known for centering Black professionals with rich inner lives, writing frankly about race, class and gender while keeping the tone warm and hopeful. Consent is explicit on the page, friendships and family ties matter as much as the romance, and food, travel and work life are woven into every story.

Outside of fiction she has written essays and commentary about books, pop culture and food for a range of magazines and online outlets. She lives in Oakland again, surrounded by towering stacks of books, a cake recipe for every occasion, an impressive lipstick collection and, more recently, a much loved rescue dog and a small but fiercely tended garden.

Her career shift from law to romance took time, but readers have embraced the result. Guillory's novels offer the comfort of a guaranteed happy ending while still feeling grounded in the everyday choices, obligations and joys of modern adult life.