Official Biography

Toni Blake was born in 1965 in Covington, Kentucky, just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, Ohio. Toni's early childhood was spent in the northern Kentucky area, where she was raised by humble, loving, hard-working parents.

When Toni was seven, her family moved south to a more rural area of Kentucky, where Toni quickly learned to despise farm work and also struggled to fit in at school. Being an only child in the country left a lot of time for imagination to grow, and it was at the age of ten when Toni decided she wanted to be a writer. She announced this to her mother one morning over breakfast, then proceeded to pen her first novel - nineteen notebook pages long.

By the time Toni entered high school, she'd written countless short stories and would soon complete a novella. She joined the yearbook and newspaper staffs as a Freshman, and by her Sophomore year, she shared co-editorship of the yearbook and had been promoted to editor-in-chief of the newspaper.

The years that followed were busy with going to college and then dropping out after realizing that Composition 101 was the only class that interested her, sharing an apartment in Cincinnati with her lifelong best friend, meeting and marrying her husband, and working as an administrative assistant and then a mutual funds accountant. Soon enough, however, she returned to her first love: writing. In her twenties, Toni tried her hand at literary fiction and penned numerous short stories, some of which saw publication and one of which garnered her a nomination for the prestigious Pushcart Prize. In that same year, she was the recipient of the Kentucky Women Writers’ Fellowship. Toni had more than forty short stories and articles published in literary, youth, and writing publications, and a number of her short stories were added to the University of Cincinnati’s Social Inequalities curriculum.

In 1996, a good friend suggested that Toni consider writing romance novels, and she shoved a couple of Jennifer Crusie's first books into Toni's hand. Though Toni hadn't read a romance in many years, she was soon hooked and suddenly understood what she was supposed to be writing: stories for and about women. Toni committed to learning as much about the romance industry as possible and began to write her first romances. In 1998, Toni sold her first three novels, all romantic comedies, to Kensington Publishing. She was featured as an "up and coming author" in the 1999 Novel & Short Story Writer's Market, and soon after served by special invitation as a writing instructor for Northern Kentucky University.

In early 2000, Toni made her first sale to Harlequin Temptation, and later expanded into Harlequin's Duets line. Since then, Toni has gone on to write deeper, more expansive novels for Avon Books, Hachette Books, NAL/Signet Eclipse, HQN, and others. She has received the National Readers’ Choice Award (2010), the Booksellers’ Best Award (2012, 2017, and 2021), and was twice nominated for the prestigious Rita Award (2008, 2015), and her Destiny and Summer Island series are fan favorites. Toni’s novels have been widely distributed all over the world and translated into over twenty languages.

Toni is now expanding into women’s fiction – stories that still contain romance but focus heavily on friend and family relationships – and is excited to challenge herself with something new. She strives to give her readers emotional, heartwarming, thought-provoking, and life-affirming stories, always grounded in the power of love and healing. 

Toni lives in northern Kentucky with her husband, and when not writing, she enjoys traveling and spending time outdoors.

Check out more photos of Toni in her Travel Photos & Event Photos​ galleries.