Rebecca Yarros

Rebecca Yarros (born April 13, 1981, Washington, D.C., U.S.) is an American romance author best known for her Empyrean series, which follows recruits at a military school in a world ruled by dragons and blends elements of romance and fantasy (“romantasy”). The third novel in the series, Onyx Storm (2025), was a massive bestseller, breaking sales records in the adult fiction genre.

Early life

Yarros grew up in a military family that moved frequently; both of her parents were lieutenant colonels in the U.S. Army. In an interview with National Public Radio at the National Book Festival in 2024, she recalled developing a love for the fantasy genre after her aunt gave her a book by fantasy author Mercedes Lackey. Yarros attended the University of Colorado on a vocal scholarship but dropped out after getting married and becoming pregnant. Later she took online courses at Troy University in Alabama, where she studied history and English, graduating in 2008.

Yarros struggled with chronic pain, migraines, and frequent joint dislocation in her youth. At age 18 she had major shoulder reconstruction surgery. In 2021, after continuing to live with chronic illness, she was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a connective tissue disorder. Yarros has also been diagnosed with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), a blood circulation disorder that affects heart rate.

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Writing career

Yarros’s fiction draws heavily from her experience as a member of a military family and as a person living with chronic illness. Yarros began writing while her husband was in Afghanistan on his third deployment with the Army. Her first published book, Full Measures (2014), is a military romance about a young woman coping with her father’s death in the Afghanistan War.

Between 2014 and 2018 Yarros published 10 romance novels, but best-seller status eluded her. She decided to pivot to the fantasy genre, retaining the romance elements of her previous work but setting her plots at a military training school in a kingdom ruled by telepathic dragons. She finally scored a hit with Fourth Wing in 2023, which sold more than two million copies in its first six months and spent three months in the top spot on The New York Times best-seller list. The Times described the novel as “like Top Gun with dragons, except that there is complete sex equality.” Yarros’s publisher, Entangled, used the book to launch a fantasy imprint.

Fourth Wing spawned two sequels, creating the Empyrean series, which follows protagonist Violet Sorrengail as she competes in the cutthroat world of dragon riding while coping with chronic illness. The series achieved extensive commercial success. The third title, Onyx Storm, broke sales records, selling more than 2.7 million copies in its first week and ranking as the fastest selling adult fiction title in 20 years. In early 2025 Yarros’s publisher said that the Empyrean series had sold more than 12 million copies in the United States.

Yarros has indicated that the series will include five books. In 2023 Amazon MGM Studios and actor Michael B. Jordan’s production company, Outlier Society, bought the film rights to Fourth Wing and are developing the Empyrean series for television. In 2026 Yarros released Threshing Day, a companion book containing 13 stories told from the perspective of various characters (including dragons) in the series.

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Among Yarros’s other contemporary romance novels (unrelated to the Flight & Glory or Empyrean series) are In the Likely Event (2023) and Variation (2024).

Personal life and views

Yarros met her husband, Jason Yarros, in 2000 at a Colorado karaoke bar when she was in college and he was a soldier in the Army. Despite Rebecca Yarros having felt that she would never marry a soldier, the two wed in 2002. The following year he was wounded while deployed in Iraq. In 2025 Yarros told Elle magazine, “It changed our lives dramatically, watching him go through four combat deployments in wars that you’re not really allowed to question as a spouse.” Her husband retired from the military in 2019, having served for 22 years through five deployments, including as a pilot.

Yarros and her husband became foster parents to a five-month-old girl in 2013 and eventually adopted her, an experience that Yarros said raised her awareness of the challenges facing foster youth and foster families. In 2019 she and her husband founded the nonprofit organization One October, which supports foster families in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where they live. Yarros and her husband have six children.

Yarros has been critical of the toll of the U.S. military’s engagements on American soldiers and their families. In 2019, the same year her husband retired, she published an open letter to the Army about the war in Afghanistan on her blog, writing:

You seem unable to end the longest war this country has ever been in. It is NOT okay to see the kids of our friends deploy to the same fronts their fathers have fought on because of your inability to get us out of this war.

Yarros elaborated on her feelings to Elle in 2025, saying that she hoped those who read her books would also ask questions about the costs of war.