Colleen Hoover, born in 1979 in Sulphur Springs, Texas, is an American novelist who began publishing while working as a social worker. Her first novel, Slammed (2012), was self-published and reached the New York Times bestseller list on reader word of mouth, establishing a career that has remained unusually reader-driven. Across more than twenty novels she has moved between new-adult romance, women's fiction, and psychological suspense, including Ugly Love, November 9, Verity (2018), and It Ends with Us (2016), which returned to the top of the charts six years after publication through BookTok and became, with its sequel It Starts with Us (2022), one of the best-selling fiction titles of the decade; in 2022 she outsold nearly every author in America, at one point holding six of the top ten spots on the Times list. It Ends with Us was adapted as a feature film in 2024. She founded The Bookworm Box, a charity subscription service, in her home state, where she still lives.
