For decades, the Romance Writers of America (RWA) served as a champion for the mostly female authors of one of the country’s most popular – and denigrated – genres of fiction.
But even as sales of romance novels have boomed in recent years, RWA has struggled, reporting that its membership has declined 80% amid bitter internal battles over racism within publishing, and within the group itself.
On Wednesday, the RWA filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy, citing millions of dollars it owes in contracts with conference centers for hotel rooms its shrinking membership can no longer fill. Since 2019, the RWA’s membership has decreased from 10,000 people to roughly 2,000, according to court records.
In bankruptcy filings, RWA president Mary Ann Jock attributed the loss of the first 7,000 members to “disputes concerning diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) issues between some members of a prior RWA board and others in the larger romance writing community”, and said the group lost additional members as its annual conferences were cancelled during the pandemic.
Some former RWA members said they disagreed with the idea that “DEI” was to blame for the group’s membership drop, with one prominent romance blogger calling the claim “utter horseshit”.
“It was a retreat from a commitment to equality that caused membership to leave RWA,” Courtney Milan, a romance author and former RWA board member who had been a prominent advocate for making the group more inclusive, told the Guardian.
One of the RWA’s original founders, in 1980, was Vivian Stephens, a pathbreaking Black romance editor at Harlequin. But Stephens was eventually pushed out of her job, and as the romance authors’ trade association grew over the years, its membership became disproportionately white. In 2018, an estimated 80% of the RWA’s 10,000 members were white, compared with only 61% of the US population.
In the early years of the Trump administration, RWA leadership had focused on diversity efforts, reckoning with the association’s failures to serve as an advocate and networking space for romance authors from all backgrounds.
Black authors and other authors of color spoke out about the racism they had faced within the group, which did not give one of its many internal “Rita” awards to a Black author until 2019. A Christian inspirational romance about a Jewish woman falling in love with a Nazi officer at a concentration camp was nominated for a Rita award in 2015.
But some white authors were unhappy with the new focus and pushed back, accusing authors of color of bullying and unprofessional behavior over their public discussions of racism.
In 2019, Kathryn Lynn Davis, a white romance author, and Suzan Tisdale, another white author who worked with Davis, filed an ethics complain against Milan, accusing her of “cyberbullying” and damaging their careers for a tweet thread in which Milan, writing as “as a half-Chinese person”, criticized the depictions of Chinese women in Davis’s Somewhere Lies the Moon. Milan called the book a “fucking racist mess”.
In late December 2019, the group’s board of directors announced it was formally censuring Milan “for conduct injurious to the organization”, and said she would be suspended from the group for a year, and barred for life from holding any further leadership positions. This set off a social media firestorm among authors and an eventual leadership meltdown.
Despite efforts by new leadership to address concerns over racism and rename its awards to honor Stephens’ role in founding the organization, RWA controversies continued. In 2021, the RWA gave an award to a historical romance novel with a protagonist who took part in the 1890 massacre of more than 300 Lakota men, women and children at the Battle of Wounded Knee. It later rescinded that award.
As membership dropped, so did the group’s membership revenue, and, after struggling to win members back and gradually laying off all of its employees to save money, RWA was forced to file for bankruptcy, it said in its court filings.
RWA estimated that it owes roughly $3m to the hotels that host its once-popular annual writers’ conference and about $74,500 in cash to other creditors. It plans to use its bankruptcy to eliminate the debt to the hotels, and instead institute a three-year payment plan that directs all of the organization’s disposable income to the hotels and other creditors.
Carollynn HG Callari, an attorney for the nonprofit, wrote in an email on Wednesday that the RWA expects a “swift resolution” to its bankruptcy restructuring, which “will not impact its day-to-day operations” of providing training and other resources to its members. The group “is not going out of business, as some others have made it sound,” she wrote.
Callari wrote that some hotels were willing to renegotiate their deals with the RWA in response to “the financial realities of this women-run nonprofit organization”, but that others were not, forcing the group to have to file for bankruptcy relief.
As the RWA has struggled, other romance organizations that explicitly prioritize diversity have grown. The Steamy Lit conference, first held in 2023, focuses on creating a welcoming environment for romance readers and writers of color, founder Melissa Saavedra said. An estimated 1,900 people are expected to attend its August conference this year.
Reuters contributed reporting
