The 2026 African American Booklist contains this essay along with a couple of other items which may also be of interest to romance scholars but which are not academic essays. To quote from the Detroit Public Library's Executive Director's note:
A sincere thank you goes to Dr. Nicole M. Jackson for her enlightening essay, “Love in Black and Black: A Brief History of Black Romance.” She writes that “Black romance authors have a rich history that is still being written, one declaration of love at a time.” A look back at more than 50 years of Black Romance titles is provided by Steve Ammidown, librarian, archivist, and historian of the romance genre.
Sylvia Hubbard’s delightful interview and tribute to Detroit’s own, Beverly Jenkins, is a must read. Ms. Jenkins speaks of herself as “just a little colored girl from the Eastside of Detroit.” However, having written over 30 novels, she is nationally revered as the “Queen of Romance” and is fondly known by many as the “Beyoncé of Romance.” (5)
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From nearly its inception in the U.S., romance had a race problem, which has obscured much of the groundbreaking work of Black women, on and off the page. In her dissertation on African American romance, Jamee Nicole Pritchard notes that much of this history still lives in “clips from newspaper and magazine articles, digitized author interviews from YouTube, writing manuals authored by African American writers in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and one-off chapters that briefly discuss the rise of multicultural romance, lumping together all novels written by, about, and for people of color.” The ephemeral nature of this history, literally and figuratively, has meant that the history of Black romance has been passed down from one author to another, one reader or librarian to another, largely absent from most mainstream discussions of the genre, but there are breadcrumbs. (12)
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As scholar and historical fiction/romance novelist Piper Huguley has suggested of historical romances, the expectation that the romance hero be wealthy has often worked to write Black men out of that role. “What is the [Black] hero doing for a profession? And is it good enough? Valid enough?...Not just financially secure, it’s gotta be the jackpot kind of economic situation… You cannot possibly have a Black man doing financially well historically speaking.” In Huguley’s assessment, Black historical romances suffered from a belief that there were either too few Black men of means historically or that a working-class hero would disrupt the fantasy necessary for an escapist romance. Even in contemporary romances, a publisher’s stronghold on its brand could narrow the bounds of the author’s creativity. For this reason, most Black men in romance have been wealthy, educated, middle class or better, or absent. (16)
The 2026 African American Booklist contains this essay along with a couple of other items which may also be of interest to romance scholars but which are not academic essays. To quote from the Detroit Public Library's Executive Director's note:
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