But An Extraordinary Union wasn’t even nominated for one of the RWA’s own annual awards. 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. One of those was another romance novelist: her friend Alyssa Cole.Ĭole is intimately familiar with the ways the romance community’s largely white gatekeepers have resisted making the genre more inclusive. Milan told only a few people the details of the ongoing investigation. 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. 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. In those passages, Kathryn Lynn Davis, the book’s white author, describes her Chinese characters’ “slanted almond eyes” and “bronze faces, turned slightly yellow by the London climate.” Milan wrote: “As a half-Chinese person with brown eyes, seriously fuck this piece of shit.”

In August of last year, a romance novelist named Courtney Milan tweeted a series of screenshots from a 1999 romance novel called Somewhere Lies the Moon.

Alyssa cole when no one is watching