C.N. Mackey is an epic fantasy author and the founder of Map's Edge Media. She writes character-driven fiction with psychological depth, ensemble casts, and prose that moves between poetry and narrative without ever choosing one over the other.

Aestraea, the original world at the heart of her seven-book series The Hearthlight Cycle, did not begin as a novel. It began as a poetry collection. The grief, the experience, the unresolvable questions that found their way into those poems eventually demanded more space, more people, more story, until a world had formed that was too large and too alive to stay on the page. The Hearthlight Cycle is where that world lives now.

The series is built for readers who want to feel something they cannot name, who return to certain paragraphs the way they return to certain pieces of music, who care more about why a character breaks than whether they win. It is fantasy that takes the full weight of the human condition seriously: the fear of the unknown, the necessity of community, the long and unglamorous work of becoming who you are supposed to be.

A World Reborn, Book 1 of The Hearthlight Cycle, is her debut novel. The Kickstarter for the special edition launched on 1 June 2026.

Originally from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, C.N. spent nearly twenty years in Los Angeles before relocating to the Oregon coast, where she writes, builds worlds, and is probably thinking about her characters right now.