One Romance Novelist’s Fight for Diverse Love Stories

One Romance Novelist’s Fight for Diverse Love Stories


Soon after, Milan got an email informing her that two formal ethics complaints had been filed against her with the Romance Writers of America, an organization whose members include some 9,000 published and aspiring romance authors. One came from Davis, who was accusing Milan of “cyberbullying” and alleging that her tweets had cost Davis a publishing contract; the other came from Suzan Tisdale, a white romance writer who runs a small publishing company where Davis worked as an editor. Months passed with no word. Milan told only a few people the details of the ongoing investigation. One of those was another romance novelist: her friend Alyssa Cole.To get more news about Read Fantasy Novels Online For Free, you can visit freewebnovel official website.

Cole is intimately familiar with the ways the romance community’s largely white gatekeepers have resisted making the genre more inclusive. Her 2017 historical romance An Extraordinary Union, about a former slave modeled on an actual Black Civil War spy, was one of the most popular romance novels that year, even garnering praise from mainstream critics—a rare feat for a genre that tends to be siloed into the realm of guilty pleasure. But An Extraordinary Union wasn’t even nominated for one of the RWA’s own annual awards. All the finalists in the historical romance category that year were white women, all but one of whom had written books where the swoony male heroes were 19th-century British aristocrats. At the time, no Black author had ever won, in any category, since the organization started giving awards in 1982. Cole’s snub prompted its own blowback—first a flood of tweets from romance writers of color about the diversity issues they’d faced in the industry and then what felt like a hollow pledge from the RWA board to do better.
Cole was one of the first people to know when, two days before Christmas in 2019, the RWA judgment on Courtney Milan came in. Milan was found guilty of violating the “association’s express purpose of creating a ‘safe and respectful environment’ for its community of writers.” Despite the RWA’s own code of ethics outlining that “non-RWA-operated social media posts” and “honest discussions of books and similar writing” were not valid grounds for complaints, Milan had been formally censured; her membership was suspended for one year, and she was banned from holding leadership positions in the future. Cole felt she couldn’t stay silent. “I just left my body with rage,” she said. She didn’t want her friend to have to shoulder the burden of speaking out alone. So, with Milan’s permission, she leaked the judgment from the RWA’s ethics committee on Twitter. What followed was an explosive reckoning over racism in the world of romance writing, one that threatened to tear the community apart. For Cole, whose romances often deal with white backlash to racial progress, the blowup was nothing less than “America in miniature.”