Episode 1: Welcome to Black Romance Has A History!

Steve: Hey, friends, and welcome to the first episode of Black Romance Has A History, a podcast where two historians, romance readers, explore the history of Black romance novels, their authors, as well as the cultural context surrounding it. This season, we’re focused on 1994, aka the summer of Black love. My name is Steve Ammidown and I run romancehistory.com.

Nicole: And I’m Nicole Jackson, a historian of African American history.

Steve: All right. Well, here we are. It’s the first episode. Let’s explain who we are because most people won’t know. My name is Steve Ammidown. I am an archivist and historian of the romance genre. I’ve been doing this for a number of years, starting from my time at the Bowling Green State University Pop Culture Library, and continuing on past that, to this point where I’m more of an independent researcher and historian. I write about authors and the context of romance, not necessarily about the books themselves, but sort of what was going on around them. I have a particular interest in Black Romance history because it hasn’t been written down very well. So I think that podcasts like this and some of my work is trying to read some of that into the record so people can take that as a jumping off point.

Steve: How about you, Nicole?

Nicole: I feel like I’m on a 1970s game show. So that’s there, that. So I’m a historian of primarily social movements in African diaspora. And most of my work is actually on Black British history. But I got interested in romance, partially because I started writing it. So my pen name is Katrina Jackson. And I’m interested in erotic romance and erotica. But as a scholar, I became interested specifically in Black historical romances because as a teacher, I’m always thinking about ways that I can teach my students to be media literate with regard to Black history. And so I’ve done a lot of work with films and television shows, and then obviously novels have become a way for me to also do that. And romance novels, Black historical romance novels are texts that I often use to have my students think about history in new formats. And through that, I’ve done some research on Black historical romance, but it’s more a hobby than my intellectual focus.

Steve: Sure, sure. And I think we’ve sort of connected over the years, starting when we were both at Bowling Green, and every time we get together, I feel like we spend like an hour and a half just like running our mouths about romance. I was like, why don’t we record this?

Nicole: Well, you were like my first teacher with romance. So I just happened to, because I love Beverly Jenkins, just happened to show up to one of the conferences you put on at the BGSU library. And then I had an idea for a research project and I was like, I don’t really actually know a whole bunch about the genre’s history. And so you were, and have continued to be like really instructive for me about the things that are outside of my areas of expertise. And so I’m always like, I don’t know this thing, let me ask Steve.

Steve: And that’s the thing. I think that the history of the romance genre is this sort of collaborative thing where it’s a lot of it has been kind of an oral history, where it’s all passed from person to person. And I think that’s one of the things about doing a podcast like this is to sort of like pass that on to a bigger audience because I can’t talk to all of you person to person. I would be very tired at the end. So I think-

Nicole: Especially for Black Romance as well, right? Like you say, like it hasn’t been like recorded very well, but also like as a Black Romance author, like I have been surprised at what other Black authors who are of previous generations have just told me in passing. So there’s just a lot of really cool stuff that you realize you have to be in the right place at the right time or whatever to even kind of get a hint of, which is, you know, as a historian, I think, how fascinating. But as also as a historian who wants to have intelligent conversations about romance, it is also frustrating.

Steve: Yeah, and I think that one of the other things about these kinds of conversations is understanding that the moment you are going through right now within the romance genre is a moment that has happened before. Like all of this is very cyclical. You know, with Black Romance, especially, there was a real boom and bust. And now we’re kind of, we’ve kind of shifted the boom a little bit. So we have more Black authors, I think, writing outside of the mainstream. But I think, you know, a conversation about 1994 is really instructive in 2024 and understanding how far we’ve come and how far we haven’t come.

Nicole: Yeah, absolutely.

Steve: Sort of the illusion of progress within the romance genre, which it really is.

Nicole: Can we call this episode the illusion of progress?

Steve: Yes, I think we shall.

Steve: So let’s maybe dive in a little bit into why we want to talk about 1994, because I’m sure the people are dying to know at this point.

Steve: So this is kind of my area of interest because it was an explosion in more ways than one. So 1994 was a year in which there were more Black romances published by the major publishing houses than in any single year previously. Dating back into the 80s, which was sort of the early American romance boom, before that the British romances of Mills and Boone and Harlequin. There had been sort of a dribble and drabble of Black authors writing Black romances, but 1994 was this moment. The Romance Writers of America called it the Year of Ethnic Romance, which is a term we’ll come back to because I know that sounds loaded, but it’s not as loaded as it sounds. And because this sort of explosion started in June and July of 1994, Beverly Jenkins and other authors who were sort of debuted or had books published that year called it the Summer of Black Love, which I think is this great sort of poetic notion of this sort of blossoming of, you know, this avenue for Black authors to write. But I also sort of, and this is where you come in, Nicole, I think, we’re going to talk about context for 1994 because romance is not a leader in culture, it is a follower. Nothing happens in a vacuum.

Steve: And I think we want to try and understand together what created this moment, like what was happening in the culture broadly, in American culture and world culture that kind of led to this, and what impact did all of this have on sort of Black authors and Black readers?

Nicole: Yeah, because I think there is this sort of popular conversation about romance as leading publishing. And while that might be true in some areas, it’s absolutely not true with regard to Black authors. They are at least a decade behind the sort of big literary push of Black authors that Tony Morrison has become emblematic of. But we see literally Black authors from the late 70s to throughout the 1980s being published by presses at an extraordinary rate writing Black stories. And romance comes well late to that, but it also, how to say this nicely, it often asks some of those writers to do the exact opposite of literary fiction, which is to write the Black experience for a primarily White audience or to lessen the cultural relevancy of some of the stories they’re telling so that they are relatable to non-Black readers. But in literary fiction, there had been this sort of move since about the Civil Rights Movement and after to write Black stories for Black readers and audiences in a very, in a way that just there’s no precedent, really, maybe since the Harlem Renaissance.

Steve: Yeah, and I think your point about readership is a really good one because there has been this sort of assumption within romance that you had to write a romance for everybody.

Nicole: Right.

Steve: And that just simply isn’t the case. There is always a very niche audience. There are inspirational Christian romances with cowboy police officers. I mean, you could get pretty granular, and there is an audience, but there has always been this expectation of Black romance authors that they have to write something that is relatable or something that fits within the acknowledged formula of the genre. And I think a lot of Black authors have fought against that in really interesting ways.

Nicole: Or they haven’t been able to.

Steve: Or they have left the genre entirely.

Nicole: And there is this, which is also why this moment is really interesting, because there is this sort of beginning of a narrative backed up by studies that Black women specifically read at an extraordinary rate. And this begins in about the 1990s. And yet romance is one of those genres that continues to purport that there are no Black women readers, or Black women do not read enough to justify publishers buying Black romances or books by Black authors.

Steve: Right. And I think what we’ll see as we talk more about 1994 is we’re going to go from a period where there were two or three Black romances coming out per month for 20, 25 years, thereabouts. And then slowly that has been whittled down to almost zero, if not rare, within the major publishing houses, specifically within Harlequin as sort of the leading publisher of what we think of as category or kind of shortened sassy romances. I can’t think of a better word for it than that. But that’s the shorter romances that are much more formulaic than sort of your longer historical or even contemporary books.

Nicole: Yeah, I think you also see after 1994, you do see this sort of, I think Harlequin does this, but I’m sure other publishers do, where you essentially see the Black version of. So if there’s a white book, essentially there’s this desire to just buy the Black version of another book that, again, sort of some authors feel hamstrung by that, and then some authors take it and run with it and end up creating a story that is all their own.

Steve: And I think someone like Brenda Jackson is a great example of that. She really made her name writing Black cowboy books, which were, you know, there were many popular white cowboy books when she started writing in the mid-90s, and she created this world around her characters and their families that has been immensely popular. She’s written well north of 200 books at this point.

Nicole: Yeah.

Steve: And cranks them out, really.

Nicole: Yeah, that’s the story, right? Ms. Bev always says that when they travel together or do something, like Brenda is always in the hotel room writing. She’s forever on deadline.

Steve: Always on deadline, yep. It’s like it’s her job.

Nicole: It’s almost like it’s her job.

Steve: So I think it would be useful for us to define some terms, because we’re going to talk about romance novels. We’re going to talk about Black romance. What does that mean? What are the different sort of permutations and versions of that? So I think we should start by defining a romance novel, which is a terrible idea that you should never do. But the Romance Writers of America, their bog standard definition is that two basic romance comprise every romance novel, a central love story and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending. You will notice that the words happily ever after are not in that definition. There’s a reason for that, but we’re not going to argue about that in this podcast, because I feel like that’s how we get in trouble.

Nicole: When does HEA fall out of the definition, do you know?

Steve: It was around this point. So it was a move towards writing a more inclusive definition. So this was adopted around 2000, 1999, 2000. I don’t know the exact date off the top of my head, but it was written to be intentionally broad to include, to also sort of include some women’s fiction elements and things like that, that didn’t sort of require the happily ever after or the happy for now, but always had them. So there’s this assumption that there is an HEA. But what that HEA looks like has been sort of the largest bone of contention within the genre for the past 30, 40 years.

Nicole: And I think it’s interesting that, which this is also why I love talking to you, because this is the industry standard definition almost 25 years ago, right? And yet the HEA is the sort of colloquial definition that has remained strong in popular conversations to the point where people are sort of arguing about, is there a new HEA.? Like, what does that mean? Whereas this language that might encompass more books and make room for more books has not circulated widely, which one of the things we talked about in putting together this podcast is sort of digging into some of those popular narratives that are at times divorced from other contexts.

Steve: And I think that what that conversation frequently lacks is sort of the nuance of an HEA can look different for different people. Whether you’re a Black author or an author from a different culture of some sort, the happily ever after doesn’t always mean marriage and a baby.

Nicole: Do you mean an epilogue baby is not a standard?

Steve: Are you sure? No, and there are people who will argue that point, but they will not take the next step and argue about HEA is looking different for different people. I think that’s something we’ll get into probably quite a bit. Those who know both Nicole and I know we have strong feelings on this subject. But in the interest of not getting canceled right away, let’s go into something that’s even more contentious in a lot of ways. So what is Black Romance? When we say Black Romance, what do we mean? Nicole, what’s your take on that definition? How would you define that?

Nicole: This is not my take. This is a community definition.

Steve: Fair enough.

Nicole: Black Romance requires all Black characters written by a Black author.

Steve: It’s that simple.

Nicole: It is that simple.

Steve: And yet, it is endlessly, again, argued about. So, yeah, go ahead.

Nicole: Well, I think that, so right before the pandemic, I was in the BGSU library, and you were helping me do research, and I realized almost immediately, as I was looking at Romantic Times issues, that, as you said, the ethnic romances really did not have a definition. So that is why the Black Romance definition is so important, because I think it is one that comes out of readers specifically. It is readers, I think, who are defining Black Romance.And until very recently, Black Romance was the only definition of, like, what could be called an ethnic romance that had such a specific and clear definition. So for instance, an Asian romance did not require that the author and all of the characters in the relationship be Asian. The same for, like, a Latinx romance. That was not a standard definition. I think that’s changing.

Nicole: But for Black Romance, at least as long as I’ve been a reader and certainly probably longer than that, that has been a standard definition. And I have my suspicions as to why, but I think it has stood out from other sort of ethnic… Again, I don’t know why I’m using this phrase. It’s so strange. ut it has stood out from other ethnic romances because it is almost a closed category in ways that others are not.

Steve: And I think maybe this is a good point to talk about the phrase ethnic romance, because it has a very specific genesis and meaning. So in the early 1980s, an editor named Vivian Stephens, who was working for Dell on their Candlelight romance line, it was her first job in romance publishing. She came in and she was a Black woman from Houston, really fantastic lady, fascinating life story. She created, she referred to in a lot of sort of interviews and press releases this idea of ethnic romance. And when she talked about ethnic romance, what she meant was people of different races and cultures should be able to see themselves on the page. So that was inclusive of Black folks, Asian Americans, and Asian diaspora people, Native Americans, and not just in cowboy and Indian romances. Also, Latinx Americans, all of these people should be able to see that. So she was trying to create a broad definition to be inclusive of all those things. And that, for a lot of years, was the definition, because it didn’t exist in a lot of ways. Vivian was able to publish a handful of candlelight and candlelight ecstasies that had Black authors, Latinx authors and Native American authors. She was never actually able to publish an Asian author, which is a different set of conversations, I think. That comes much later. But after Vivian leaves Dell, goes to Harlequin, publishes Sandra Kitt’s Adam and Eva, which is Harlequin’s first romance featuring Black characters written by a Black author. Everything sort of disappears after that. There are very few Latinx authors, almost no Black authors, and very few Native American authors as well writing romances. So it had this thing, and now it has sort of narrowed down to these sort of more more granular definitions.

Nicole: Yeah, which I think there has been this sort of recurring conversation about literally every February, this one comes up again, but that often Black romances are sort of pitted against, in particular, multicultural romances, because it was then getting into categories on publishers and in libraries in very specific ways. But the really cool sort of thing happening, I think relatively recently, is readers and authors reminding people that you can have Black people of different cultures, so you can have a Black multicultural romance. The biggest distinction here is that an interracial romance, which has often, again, every February, been included into Black romance recommendations and categories and articles, that is something different. And I think Black readers in particular recently have done a very good job of toeing the line, of making that definition clear and stick.

Steve: And I think it’s also important to talk about the fact that interracial romance was not really a thing until about 1994, 95. So again, going back to this time period that we’re talking about. So I think that’s something we’ll get into a little bit because that’s, I think, a really interesting area where it comes to Black characters. We did have interracial romance in terms of white characters with Native American characters, which is what was known for a lot of the 80s and the 90s as Indian romances, which is not country of India, that is, it refers to Native Americans. And these were these sort of exploitative model minority kind of romances where a brave warrior finds a white woman wandering in the trail and saves her life, etc. And for a lot of years, that was the only acceptable interracial romance of any sort within the romance community.

Nicole: And I think, yeah, I would love to get into that because I love talking about recent media. But I think it is something interesting to say that how often interracial romances, and actually any of those people, whether it’s an Asian romance or a Latinas romance or a Black romance, often sort of pit the character of color against a white love interest, which I think you actually see in some of the earlier Black romances, where they’re almost also across the aisle romances. Like Sandra Kitt had, was she the one who had the one with the white police officer?

Steve: Yes. Yeah, The Color of Love, which was published early 1995.

Nicole: Yeah.

Steve: And it took her 10, 11 years to sell that book because of that sort of character blend.

Nicole: And I think that idea of the sort of, because I would categorize that as an across the aisle romance because of how often the sort of character archetypes sort of essentially pit these, this Black and White person from these two very different cultures as initially adversaries, which I think that particular setup has also persisted in interracial romances, maybe not as frequently as before, but certainly in indie romances, I think you see that over and over again for better.

Steve: Sure.

Steve: Could you talk a little bit more about the idea of multicultural, what that means as a categorization to you in terms of Black folks from different backgrounds or different African Americans versus those from Jamaica or things like that?

Nicole: I think that not enough people talk about the boundaries of that, but I do think that you do have a lot more people writing multicultural Black romances of people, I think often usually African Americans or Black Americans and Caribbean people, which makes a whole bunch of sense if you’re thinking about either the prevalence of vacation romances or romances set in Caribbean countries or just romances set in major metropolitan areas like New York that have long histories of Black American and Afro-Caribbean migration and settlement. So you start to see what is really a representation of a very long history of Black Americans and Afro-Caribbeans intermarrying and living in the same neighborhoods because of racial segregation. And so I think that in the context of Black romances, especially for me as a diasporic historian, like seeing romances with Black people from various different backgrounds, as you also have writers from various different backgrounds, is really important. And I would say to some extent that is a newer phenomenon in terms of just the number of romances that have been written recently.

Steve: All right, now would be a great time for us to talk books. So what is included in the Summer of Black Love? What is part of that 1994, that class of 1994, I like to call it? And what defined that, and what exists on the outside of that? So why don’t we talk a little bit about what we’re considering for this list, and why we’re putting them on the list? One of the books that Nicole, you and I have talked about a lot is Invisible Life by E. Lynn Harris. Can you talk about why you think it should or should not be included?

Nicole: I think E. Lynn Harris is a really great example of books that like the romance genre would not pick up as being a romance, but Black readers would. I think beyond the fact that he is amongst a class of like Black contemporary writers who are writing about the Black experience, and in his case, he’s writing about Black gay men, but they’re also writing a lot of the hallmarks of romances of a Black community. They’re writing in ways and about people who feel familiar to Black readers, where love, many kinds of love, are like central to the story they’re telling. But he also wouldn’t be picked up by Romance One because Romance is years before publishing a book like his that centers the characters he centers. But he is maybe a little bit more, even though he’s not writing literary fiction, I think he’s a little bit more aligned to the possibilities of literary fiction that had long since made space for queer Black people to exist.

Nicole: And so his book Invisible Life, which was previously self-published, being picked up, I think is a really great example of not just the quality of his work, but also the fact that he had found an audience enough to be identified as an important writer that traditional publishing should acknowledge and also make money off of and provide opportunities for him. And I think the fact that his book is traditionally published in this year at the same time as some of these others is actually a really great example of the limitations of romance in 1994 that even as these other authors are breaking through a barrier, so many more barriers still exist.

Steve: Absolutely. And I think that, yeah, that year is sort of this groundbreaking year across Black literature is a really interesting way of looking at it. And I think that, you know, we sort of we’re focusing on romance is both this sort of disservice, but also, I think, a service at the same time. Does that make sense? No, I feel like this is, you know, this thing where we talk about the legitimacy or illegitimacy of romance in general, and sort of looking at it from this broader context of being more inclusive of things that might fall into literary fiction, sort of, you know, these things inevitably influence each other. They’re sort of always in this conversation. So I think that, yeah, I think we should definitely talk about these books like E. Lynn Harris and some of the other Black queer authors who are coming around at this time. I think we should talk about them in a future season. Like, maybe that’s where to go.

Nicole: I think also that this is a really great example of the fact that genre can be limiting, right? Like our understanding of genre in this moment, like in the moment presently now, not in 1994, it can stop us from thinking about other stories that are in conversation with romance novels and authors who are in conversation and in community with one another. And then also, for Black readers, these are authors and books they would have been reading, and maybe they did not care about, like I was the kind of reader who didn’t care about genre definitions. I just wanted to read Black authors.

Steve: Well, and we’ll also talk a lot this season about subgenre and what historical romance looks like, what even historical, or not historical, but romantic intrigue looks like when it’s a Black author and Black character. So I think that’s, there are layers on layers there that we will definitely dig into.

Nicole: So our list starts with E. Lynn Harris’s Invisible Life, published by Anchor Books, which was an imprint of Doubleday.

Steve: And that came out in February of 94, which I think, if I remember, the self-published had come out, I think, two years prior.

Nicole: I don’t know. Yeah.

Steve: And then we jump to July. So a few months ahead, we really, we start the summer of Black Love as we understand it in earnest. The first one, which I think is really interesting, is Looks Are Deceiving by Maggie Ferguson, which was a Harlequin Intrigue. So this was the first Harlequin Intrigue written by a Black author with Black characters. It was also Maggie Ferguson’s debut. She is in her other life an attorney in the St. Louis area, I believe. But she went on to write three more books that were all harlequin intrigue. And so she’s a really interesting sort of side character, because we haven’t heard a lot about her in sort of other conversations about Black romance authors.

Nicole: Next up, also in July, is Night Song by Beverly Jenkins, published by Avon, which is fantastic. It’s a historical romance that begins right at the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction, which is a really popular historical moment for Beverly Jenkins’ book.

Steve: And I think that is going to be a really interesting thing to talk about with Bev, who’s going to be one of our guests later on, about what that moment was like and how publishing didn’t take up that historical baton in a lot of ways.

Steve: Then we move on to Serenade by Sandra Kitt. Sandra Kitt published two books in this year. This was, I think, her 12th or 13th book. She had been around since 1984 at this point, but she becomes one of the launch authors for Pinnacle’s Arabesque line. Sandra Kitt is someone who is still writing, still writing romance, still writing women’s fiction. She walks this line between both, I think. She’s a fascinating figure that has this sort of stick-to-itiveness, for lack of a better word. She’s up there with Bev as someone who’s been around for the entirety of all this.

Nicole: And then also in July, and also from Pinnacle, an Arabesque is Forever Yours by Frances Ray, which I feel like a lot of what you said about Sandra is also true of Frances and her long career.

Steve: Right, yeah, and this wasn’t a debut for Frances. She had published with, I think, Doubleday at that point, and she also wrote for Odyssey Books. So she had been around. She also becomes an important figure later on in sort of the formation of community, which we’ll talk about later.

Steve: Moving into August, we have Beguiled by Eboni Snoe, which was her second book. But this is also, so this is going to be repetitive for a while. The rest of these are all Pinnacle Arabesque books, which is both important and repetitive. But Beguiled by Eboni Snoe is this sort of longer book, which is interesting. So the Sandra Kitt and Francis Ray books were sort of short, kind of category length, you know, 150, 200 pages. Eboni Snoe’s book goes on for, I want to say, it’s 300 some odd pages. So that’s, I think, another interesting thing we’ll talk about with Pinnacle and Arabesque. But Eboni Snoe is someone who wrote for a number of years and now is sort of one of the grand dames of Black Romance at this point.

Nicole: And the next was A Sweet Refrain by Margie Walker, who is going to be one of our guests this season.

Steve: Yeah, and this was her second book. She had written for an independent publisher called Marron, who published, I think, a grand total of three romance novels. They were a New York-based publisher. They sort of were like, hey, we’ll try this. And then they just sort of went back to publishing more sort of literary fiction and other things as well.

Nicole: Yeah.

Steve: Yeah.

Nicole: You’re next.

Steve: Oh, I’m next.

Steve: So moving into September, at this point, Arabesque is publishing two titles a month.

Steve: They would, the next year, go into three titles a month. But in September, we have Happily Ever After by Rochelle Alers.

Nicole: And then Whispers of Love by Shirley Hailstock.

Steve: And Shirley is interesting because the next year, she writes Pinnacle Arabesque’s first historical Black romance.

Nicole: And her only historical, right?

Steve: Yes, as far as I know, it was her only historical. And she becomes a bigger figure later on within the Romance Writers of America. And I think that’s something we’ll get into because Black authors and the Romance Writers of America are a whole other. That’s a whole show on its own.

Nicole: That’s a whole show.

Steve: It’s a whole show.

Steve: In October, we have Temptation by Donna Hill.

Nicole: I was going to say also Rochelle is still writing.

Steve: Yes, Rochelle is still writing.

Steve: And she’s writing… I think it was Rochelle who wrote… What was it? She wrote a 60s historical, didn’t she?

Nicole: No, that’s Donna.

Steve: That’s Donna. Okay, Donna, who we get to next.

Steve: In October, Donna Hill releases Temptation with Arabesque. Donna is someone who had been writing at that point for a number of years. She is the one who started out as a advice columnist in True Confessions magazines. A few of the interviews with her, she talked about this, and it’s a neat thing. But as I said, Donna has also written some more recent historicals, which is something that I’m fascinated by. And I know that you, Nicole have dipped your toes into this.

Nicole: But also, I am a fan of near historicals. Please stop writing about the mid to late 19th century.

Steve: Yes, absolutely.

Nicole: Before and after.

Steve: And just to get on my soapbox for a second, one of the things, if you look at Christian inspirational romances, they have already moved into the 20th century. They’re writing World War I, World War II romances. And I feel like sort of mainstream romance, even, well, indie has kind of come along, but mainstream romances have truly just not come that far yet, which is fascinating.

Nicole: They haven’t. And indies have touched a little bit in the 20th century, but maybe Ms. Bev or others will want to talk about this, but indies don’t write a lot of historical romances, and there are probably reasons for it. I mean, there are reasons for it, and many of them I probably don’t know. But yeah, they haven’t moved too much in the 20th century. The only sort of two big things in the near historical phase, I think, have been, there’s a, Alyssa Cole does a few in the 20th century, early to mid-20th century, and then there’s like a decades series that goes through most of the decades of the 20th century that have indie, hybrid, and traditional published authors.

Steve: So also in October, we had For the Love of You by Felicia Mason, which was her debut. Felicia Mason, I believe, was the youngest of the authors in this year. And she is, she went on to write a number of, not only contemporaries, but she also went into inspirational romance. Later in her writing career, she’s one of the few Black authors who’s written in for Harlequin’s inspirational lines, which I think really interesting.

Steve: Then we skipped November because publishing. So you sort of have November, December. December is where we get into Arabesque publishing three titles a month.

Nicole: Which starts off with Bands of Gold by Angela Benson.

Steve: Right.

Steve: And then No Ordinary Love by Monique Gilmore.

Nicole: Sweet Promise by Layle Giusto.

Steve: I think it’s either Giusto or Giusto, either one.

Steve: And then the first Arabesque novella collection, Spirit of the Season.

Steve: I haven’t actually made it to that book. I have it on my shelf. But that compiles three holiday theme stories by Donna Hill, Frances Ray and Margie Walker. All of the single titles that came in December were by debut authors. And I think that’s one of the things about Pinnacle Arabesque is as they go on, it’s mostly debut authors. It’s a lot of one and done, but there’s also a lot of authors who sort of keep coming back within both the Pinnacle times and then after they sell the BET as well, which is a whole other separate thing that comes. That was 1999, 98 or 99. So those are the books to sort of cover the second half of that year, really, that we’re going to sort of use as mile markers more than anything.

Steve: At this point, we’re not going to go through each book, but we will put all the books in the show notes so that you can track them down. They are all widely available. The only one that I ever had trouble trying to track down was Sweet Promise by Layle Giusto, and I’m not sure why that happened, but all the other ones are a few bucks on eBay or Rift Books.

Nicole: Well, I know you talked about this, but it’s interesting to think about like archiving and collecting, like Black Romance, which, you know, is its own, like we keep saying, it’s another conversation.

Nicole: It’s its own thing.

Steve: Yeah.

Nicole: Yeah, availability becomes a larger issue.

Steve: Yeah. And I think that, you know, and I think we should talk about that at some point, because I have unintentionally caused the prices of several Black Romance novels to skyrocket over the past few years just by talking about them. So I think that’s a really interesting thing to get into is what is collectible and why is it collectible and what causes these sort of manias and sort of moments of price hikes.

Nicole: Well, and also covers become a whole conversation here, which I know I’ve had conversations with people about, in particular, Ms. Bev’s books, specifically wanting those plunge covers that, especially for her earlier books, are very difficult to find in good condition. And then since you are an academic archivist, I’ve been always surprised if you have access to a university library about what’s available. At least, I’ve been in Ohio for almost two decades, but I’m always shocked at what kinds of genre fiction the Ohio network of university libraries has. And it is usually titles like these that, randomly enough, we have forgotten as a genre, but exist in some university libraries.

Steve: Which is great on its own, but yeah, there’s also some of them do languish in thrift book warehouses across the country. And I think part of what I want to do with this podcast is get people out there, sort of snapping these up, to understand both the context of the books, but also the books and how all of this sort of operates in a circular motion. And things come back around, and there’s a lot to dig into.

Nicole: And related to that, I think also, there are always so many conversations online about Romance’s history that I don’t realize. I mean, going right on back to us, including E. Lynn Harris here, I don’t think people realize how often those conversations are exclusionary or that they are based on a very particular frame of reference. I didn’t read Romance as a child, but I did read E. Lynn Harris, and I did read Eric Jerome Dickey, and I did read Jay California Cooper, none of whom were Romance authors, but were absolutely authors who were writing about the same things I love in Romance, like love, romantic, friendship, familial, and community. So even just expanding the conversation about what books we identify as in the genre’s history and worthy of conversation.

Steve: Yeah, and I think that’s what I’ve tried to get at over the last few years is like, yeah, we talk about Joanna Lindsay and Janet Daly and some of the bigger names, but there are a lot of people with interesting backstories who were writing a couple of books, and then they were done. But their contributions are nonetheless important because of the point of view they brought to the genre.

Nicole: Yeah.

Nicole: And also, I once had an interview with Nicole Falls, who will be one of our guests this season, where she asked if I had read a book by Kate, not Kate Hudson. It’s some woman who has the same name as an actress, and I was like, this person writes romance? And I had no idea what she was talking about. I thought she meant the actor, because I had just never heard of this person. I can’t remember by the time we have our conversation with her. But I literally was just absolutely flummoxed. I was like, what are you talking about? Who is this person? And it’s that sort of reframing, which is a really significant part of my teaching, but reframing away from whiteness as a norm. And so the assumption that we have all read Johanna Lindsay or that we’ve all read all these other people whose names literally just flew out of my brain in this moment. But the assumption that that’s where our love of romance or romantic storylines began with white authors is, I think, another point of this podcast.

Nicole: Because one, it should be done, but also it totally opens up a new world or a new way of looking at the romance world that I think is sorely needed.

Steve: Yeah, and I think one of the things that maybe in general the community doesn’t talk about enough is there’s so much generational churn in readers and authors that exactly what you were just talking about, even Black romance readers who are reading right now may not have heard any of these names that we’re talking about, or half of them. Someone like Felicia Mason or Angela Benson who were very popular in their moment are not on the radar. So I think that’s the real value of sort of saying Black romance has a history, right? Like there’s a background, this is not new, and that’s good. And I think understanding where it came from and what has sort of helped and hamstrung it is kind of what I want to get at. Like I want to understand what got us to this point. We look at this list of books from 1994, and this feels like a juggernaut, right? This feels like the start of something. And 30 years on, we’re back down to this occasional dribble from mainstream publishing of Black authors.

Nicole: And so many of these authors, as you said, have been forgotten? Or there’s also this sort of recency bias, too, with readers in general, where whatever is published in the last five years, you forget that there’s all these things that preceded it, whether it’s the longevity of some of these authors’ careers, which is absolutely… It’s impossible to imagine that now, right?

Nicole: But also just that there are writers today whose these were books that they read as children, young adults, that inspired the way that they are writing their own books as well.

Steve: I’m so excited to dig into these conversations.

Steve: Let’s tell the people, some of the folks we have lined up, we’ve mentioned some names, but let’s break it down for everybody. So the first name, the most important name, the one we all know involved.

Nicole: There’s no most important. Everyone here is on equal footing.

Steve: Everyone is equal, except for Ms. Bev.

Nicole: I don’t think even she would say that.

Steve: No, I know, I know, I know. I tease, I tease.

Nicole: But we both are Ms. Bev fan girls.

Steve: Yes, absolutely. Love Bev. She is a delightful person, in addition to being an incredible author. She is just up the road from both of us, up in Michigan. So we’ll have some local conversations, maybe talk about Indigo and its sort of relationship to Northwest Ohio and Southeast Michigan. As well as one of the other names we mentioned was Margie Walker, which is a name a lot of people won’t know as a romance author, but she was one of the sort of first people, but she also stuck around for a number of years writing romance. She is now mostly a filmmaker, but we’re going to talk to her. I’m very excited for that.

Steve: Also, you can’t really talk about a publisher without talking to a publisher. So we have enlisted the aid of Steven Zacharius, whose father, Walt Zacharius, was the one who created Arabesque. Steven was also one of the early proponents of romance on the internet. He created something called Z Talk, which was a BBS or bulletin board service run by Kensington. So we’re going to talk to him about what he remembers from 1994, as well as some of those community building things that he did.

Nicole: And then we’re going to talk to Nicole Falls, who is a self-published Black Romance author of many years, as well as a podcaster. And just in general, and also she makes really great merch, all focused around Black Romance as a theme because she is an absolute supporter of Black Romance and protector of Black Romance as well in the conversations we have online about the genre. Also a long-term reader, which is the other thing.

Steve: She has been around for a while as a reader and more recently as an incredible advocate for Black authors within Romance. And we will have more that we are still trying to line up, and we will share everything with you all. And I don’t know, I’m real excited, Nicole. How are you feeling about this?

Nicole: I don’t really know what excitement is, so I can’t. No, I’m very excited. I think that this podcast is really the culmination of years of conversations that Steve and I have had on and offline about the history of Black romance. As a historian, it’s a thing that matters to me, but also as an author who enters into these spaces, like it is an oversight that I have long found frustrating. And so rather than sit in that frustration another year, Steve and I are having these conversations, and I hope that other people are as excited about them as we are.

Steve: I hope so, because we’re going to just be dorking out the whole time, and if they can’t handle it, they can’t handle it.

Nicole: All right. Well, you know, that’s usually when my students cut me off. So I feel like that is a great way to end this first episode.

Steve: Oh, all right. Well, thank you for joining us. We will see you online. We are on Instagram at @blackromancehistory, and everywhere you get your pods and podcasts and whatnots. And yeah, we’ll talk to you next time.

Steve: Make sure to subscribe and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. You can follow us online at blackromancehistory.com or find us on Instagram @blackromancehistory Thanks for listening.