Ashley Warlick started her first novel during her junior year at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The Distance from the Heart of Things was published in 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company, and Ashley was awarded the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship.

She moved to Greenville, South Carolina in 1999 and went on to publish The Summer after June (2000) and Seek the Living (2006) with Houghton Mifflin. During this time she also taught creative writing at Anderson College, The South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, and took a position as an instructor in the Low Residency MFA Program at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina, which she still holds today.

In 2006, Ashley was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She was at work on the novel The Arrangement, based on the life of culinary writer MFK Fisher. It was published by Penguin Random House in 2016 and reached the bestseller list of the Los Angeles Times in paperback.

In 2010, Ashley became the editor of edible Upcountry, a magazine focused on local and sustainable foodways in the Upstate. She also reviewed books for The Hartford Courant and The White Plains Journal News and wrote profiles and essays for The Oxford American, McSweeney’s, Redbook, and Garden & Gun, among others.

​In 2015, she was part of the team of women who opened M. Judson Booksellers, an independent bookstore in the Historic Courthouse in the heart of downtown Greenville. She works as the buyer for that store and its sister store in Auburn, Alabama, Auburn Oil Co. Booksellers. She is at work on her next novel.