Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams rose to prominence in 2018 as the first Black woman selected by a major party to vie for the highest position in her home state. But when she lost, she alleged voter suppression led to an unfair election. She started an organization and wrote a book about the ordeal but also saw another wave of popularity in 2020 for her contribution to the election of the future president.
Stacey is the prime example of a working woman who writes novels on her free time. She moonlights as a romance novelist under the pseudonym Selena Montgomery. As Selena, she has written four novels with HarperCollins Publishers. As Stacey, she has written two nonfiction best-sellers.
In January, Henry Holt and Co. announced Stacey would release a book in June during the height of the presidential election about her work to make voting equal for all Georgians. Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America is written like the average politico book discussing her upbringing but adds her journey in creating Fair Fight, an organization dedicated to promoting fair elections in Georgia and across the U.S., encouraging eligible adults to vote, and educating them on their voting rights.
On her media book tour earlier this year, the Yale-trained lawyer and Spelman Woman also motivated Americans to participate in the 2020 Census, which was impacted by the sudden COVID-19 pandemic in March. In her book, she recalls how Republicans such as outgoing President Donald Trump and conservative pundits badmouthed her for not conceding in her 2018 election.
My cardinal sin is that I have refused to concede the outcome of the 2018 gubernatorial contest, and I have made a crusade of calling out and defeating voter suppression. I do so as a private citizen, and this reality greets me every day. As I have traveled the country in the months since the election, I typically begin my speeches the same way. “I am not the governor of Georgia,” I tell the assembled crowds, to boos and hisses of support. Then I declare with equal conviction a truth I hold deep in my heart: “We won.”
Fast forward to November when Democratic President-elect Joe Biden grasped victory, and Stacey along with Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms were being thanked publicly by other Democrats and supporters who credited their campaigning to moving voters to the polls in a traditionally Republican red state in which Biden won the electoral votes. Though she said Trump ridiculed her for not conceding in her election, he has yet to concede in his latest election.
Soon after the election, Stacey notched another book deal. Doubleday and Anchor Books announced her new novel, While Justice Sleeps, a U.S. Supreme Court thriller expected to be on bookshelves by May 25, 2021. Doubleday will manage the first printing of 150,000 copies while the book will be published in hardcover, e-book, and audiobook by Penguin Random House. The paperback version will be published by Anchor in 2022. A romance novelist, Stacey said she’s excited to join the legal thriller genre.
As an avid consumer of legal suspense novels and political thrillers, I am excited to add my voice into the mix. Drawing on my own background as a lawyer and politician, WHILE JUSTICE SLEEPS weaves between the Supreme Court, the White House and international intrigue to see what happens when a lowly law clerk controls the fate of a nation.
As we wait for Stacey’s next book, she spent 2020 becoming an icon in the political world and in the literary world.
