Stacey Abrams Is the Author of Eight Unapologetically Hot Romance Novels

Stacey Abrams personally helped sway the 2020 election with her voting rights work. She ran a historic race for governor in Georgia in 2018, and reportedly plans to run again. She’s a powerful orator and emerging icon, the kind of figure lefty parents dress their toddlers as for Halloween. One day, she might be our president.

And Stacey Abrams, under the pen name Selena Montgomery, has published romance novels. Eight of them, to be exact.

Not a self-published passion project, not a well-kept blog, but full-length paperbacks with names complete with glossy covers showing entangled limbs, and published by Avon, the romance imprint of HarperCollins. She was a student at Yale Law when she completed her first novel, Rules of Engagement, concurrently with her master’s thesis, titled “Devolution’s Discord: Resolving Operational Dissonance with the UBIT Exemption.” Her books—the most recent was published in 2009—are in the adventure and suspense sub-genre. Every one of them features Black protagonists, a rarity in the notoriously white-washed romance writing industry.

Asked by the Washington Post in 2018 why she didn’t attempt to hide her writing career before going into politics, she responded, “I’m proud of what I accomplished.”

Stacey is Selena and Selena is Stacey. That much has been widely reported. A Black woman leader who also has an interest in sex, love, and adventure is seen as an oddity. Even the warmest references to Abrams’s novels tend to treat their existence as a fun fact, rather than evidence of huge talent and unprecedented frankness. 

But what about the novels themselves? Are they decadent? Cringe? Laced with tax law? I sat down and actually read them. Across the country, thousands of women are doing the same thing.

“So hey why don’t you all go buy Stacey Abrams’s books and make sure she earns out and has big royalty checks?” writer Michelle Li tweeted on November 5, garnering over 17,000 responses. Li lives in Atlanta and volunteered with Fair Fight Action ahead of the presidential election, inspired by Abrams’s gubernatorial loss in 2018. “She deserves a level of comfort for all the work she’s done, and a level of security for whatever steps she has planned next,” Li tells Glamour, of why she encourages people to buy Selena Montgomery books. “OMG!!! I had NO idea! On it!!!” one woman responded. “Done,” added dozens of others.

Abrams’s novels have united two of the lustiest, most exuberant fandoms: romance readers, and liberals. The effect has been sizable. The morning after the election was called for Joe Biden, Bea Koch woke up and began processing orders that had come in overnight to the Ripped Bodice, the romance-only bookstore she owns with her sister, Leah, in Los Angeles. Usually, the store receives a handful of overnight orders. But that morning, she saw pages and pages of orders, all requesting books by one author: Selena Montgomery.

Koch bundled up all the Selena Montgomery books they had in the store—the sisters have had a warm relationship with Abrams since her run for governor—and ordered 60 more books from the publisher. The orders kept coming; she ordered another hundred. More orders poured in, and she called HarperCollins. “Sit tight,” they told her. “We’re going to have to print more.”

“We’ve definitely seen an increase in interest in Stacey’s Selena Montgomery books ever since her gubernatorial race, and that has been ongoing throughout this election,” says Erika Tsang, the editorial director at Avon, the romance imprint of HarperCollins.

“I like that I don’t have to change the character to fit me,” says Terra, a reader in Columbus, Ohio, who picked up Selena Montgomery books this summer, hoping to provide direct support to Abrams. “I love that I can read about African American characters who have all types of backgrounds but aren’t necessarily defined by them.”

“Also,” she says, “the sex scenes are good without being too much.”

Upon learning that major national figure Stacey Abrams has written romance novels, people tend to become slack-jawed and prone to blinking, as dramatic in their reactions as characters in a Selena Montgomery novel. Most people assume that Abrams hid her shameful side hustle, that the reveal must be the work of GOP operatives, that perhaps Abrams will soon appear with a copy of, say, Deception, and announce, “I sincerely regret writing about a small town woman whose quest to solve a murder brings her close to the stark beauty of FBI Special Agent Caleb Matthews.”

In fact, Abrams has never hidden her romance writing success—Selena Montgomery’s author page names Abrams and shows her headshot. During Abrams’s campaign for Georgia governor, she dressed up as Selena Montgomery for a Halloween event. Her political career and writer’s life seem to come from the same deep wellspring of self-regard: In both, she has demonstrated, time and time again, a kind of ruthless unwillingness to be shamed.

But plenty of people have tried to shame her. “I don’t want you to read any of these,” she told Stephen Colbert when he insisted on reading an excerpt from one of her novels during her appearance on his show in the wake of her gubernatorial loss. Ignoring her, he read a sexy scene to the audience as she sat next to him, laughing uncomfortably.

“I think we all know what she’s supposed to be embarrassed about—she’s supposed to be embarrassed that women have and like sex,” Bea Koch tells Glamour. But Abrams has continued to speak openly and proudly about her novels, all through the 2020 election cycle. “She’s like, ‘Whatever dude, I wrote a book I got paid for it. What exactly is the embarrassing part?’” Leah Koch says.

Should political luminary Stacey Abrams be embarrassed for having written the phrase “her thigh brushing his turgid length”? What about “Bending, he licked voraciously at the pouting crests”? Well, is it embarrassing that John Updike gave one of his characters the line “Want me inside?” Or that Norman Mailer wrote “[He] was now as soft as a coil of excrement. She sucked on him nonetheless.” No need to look to literary giants for point of comparison—what about when former British prime minister Tony Blair wrote and published a description of sex with his wife that included the phrase “I was an animal following my instinct.”

Abrams’s prose is appropriately romantic—lushly embroidered with detail and imagery, no adjectives spared, no fear of cliché or pretentious instinct getting in the way of a juicy story. Secrets and Lies follows Sebastian Caine, “a thief and a damned good one,” who finds himself scaling a mountain range with ethnobotanist Dr. Katelyn Lyda, in search of a manuscript that holds the secrets to eternal life. He has “the look of a dark lord—tight, sexy, and remorseless.” And she is “gorgeous amazon, a true femme fatale with a fierceness to match.” I mean—can I make it any more obvious?

Though Montgomery books feature a surprising range of vocabulary (sybaritic! panegyric! enervate! sangfroid!) early readers probably enjoyed the books without guessing that the steamy author also had a law habit.

There is one giveaway. In Secrets and Lies, for example, there is exactly one sex scene. But there are hundreds of pages about restoring stolen resources to Indigenous peoples, the danger of corrupt government officials, and the intoxicating sexiness of smart, educated women. Selena Montgomery protagonists are equally as horny for justice and truth as they are for creamy skin and flawless breasts.

Would you believe that there is an audience for books about men who worship brilliant, strong women? “I like romance and tend towards Black female or nonbinary authors who showcase love, consent, and sexiness,” says Letta, an Oregonian reader who devoured three Montgomery books from the library after a friend tipped her off to the Abrams connection. If you’re waiting to get your hands on one of the books, hang in there, she says. “They’re worth it.”

But many in the Stacey Abrams fandom romance-democracy alliance are not content to wait. Romancing the Runoff began as an auction fundraiser for Fair Fight and other organizations battling voter suppression in Georgia ahead of the runoff election. The homespun effort, organized by four major romance authors, escalated overnight into a mini-movement in a turn worthy of a romance novel’s dramatic climax. Launched by Courtney Milan, Alyssa Cole, and Kit Rocha (the pen name of co-writing team Donna Herren and Bree Bridges), Romancing the Runoff was raking in donations weeks before the November 25 auction. 

Response from the romance community was “overwhelming,” Bridges tells Glamour. They thought they would cap the auction at 300 donations, but they received over 700, and had to close down submissions, with writers and readers still begging for the chance to give generously to the pro-democracy event. “When romance decides to do something, we go big,” Bridges says.

Donations have continued to roll in, even after the auction—the group has now raised over $450,000. All of the money is going to Fair Fight, the New Georgia Project, and Black Voters Matter, who are hitting the ground hard in the run-up to Georgia’s two Senate seat runoff elections in January, which will decide control of the Senate. “They’re organizations that are just trying to remove barriers for people to vote,” Bridges says. “That shouldn’t be a partisan thing.”

What if romance readers are the satin straw that breaks the Republican stranglehold on the Senate, effectively changing the course of U.S. history? The general public would be surprised—and probably condescendingly amused. But members of the romance community don’t subscribe to the limited notion that a person is either sensual or serious. 

Romance writers are frequently powerhouses in other industries. Many are lawyers. “It makes them more interested in developing worlds that have internal senses of justice,” Bridges says. Eloisa James is the pen name of celebrated Shakespeare professor Mary Bly. Milan, one of Romancing the Runoff’s founders, clerked for Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court, before publishing books with titles like Proof by Seduction and Trial by Desire.

In fact, for a romance writer or fan, Stacey Abrams’s dramatic ascent “seems pretty natural,” Bridges says. “What she did in Georgia was what characters in romance novels do—they suffer a terrible setback, everything seems like everything is lost, they gather their community and they go and say ‘No, I’m going to change this, I’m going to get to my happy ending.’”

A common thread runs through Abrams’s public-facing life: through her refusal to concede Georgia’s gubernatorial election in 2018 because of the mass voter suppression tactics that her opponent had pursued, through her efforts to help register more than 800,000 voters ahead of the presidential election, through her refusal to be cowed while a TV host tried to embarrass her for her writing. It’s a kind of forthright desire. She acts almost like a character from another book, from a story without patriarchy or crooked politics. The transgression of Stacey Abrams isn’t just about sex; it’s about not being embarrassed to want. Stacey Abrams holds the pen that writes her own heroic story. That’s obscene.

Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour. You can follow her on Twitter.

Originally Appeared on Glamour