Cassandra Jean Hardy was born in Boulder, Colorado, during the summer of 1994.
She has been writing since she was a child. Her first attempt at a novel, a Stephen King knockoff entitled
Claws, debuted on her custom geocities website some time around 2004, when she was 10 years old.
Since that time, her love of the written word has only grown.
Jean has long had a fascination with language and linguistics, and elected to study Linguistics
during her time at Metropolitan State University of Denver (2013-2019). While working full time
to help support herself, Jean studied Spanish, Translation, and Maya Linguistics under professors
Robin Quizar, Andrew Pantos, and Marina Gorlach. She assisted with the translation into Spanish
of various folktales which were previously available only in Ch'orti' Maya and English. She also
assisted in the analysis of the underlying grammatical structure of the Ch'orti' language and how
it has shifted due to influence from Spanish in the last 500 years.
While attending university, Jean began to transition and live as a woman. Despite some initial setbacks,
the clear majority of her friends and relatives were accepting and validating of her reality.
Jean began her transition in 2018 and consistently refers to it as "one of the two best decisions of my life."
Jean graduated from college in 2019 with dual bachelors in Linguistics and Spanish Translation.
Since then, she has mostly devoted herself, in both personal and professional life, to her writing.
By Smoke and Flame, in its earliest forms, was being written by 2014.
In 2020, everything shifted when the novel Coronavirus COVID-19 descended upon the world. Shunted inside,
with nothing to do but write and watch One Piece, Jean began to remake the novel in its current form.
Around this time, she began her relationship with her future husband. The pair married in 2024, on Saturnalia.
Jean continues to devote herself to her creative projects. When she is not working on her novels,
she is usually playing Dungeons & Dragons, drawing, or playing fighting games. Her favorite passtime
with her husband is playing Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, which the pair used to stay close when they
were long-distance for several years leading up to their eventual marriage.