The Women Who Changed the American Mass-Market Romance Genre: BIPOC Editors, Authors, and Category Romance Novels from 1980 to 1988

Abstract Two Black women editors changed American category romance fiction in the late 1970s-80s. Working at Dell and Doubleday, Vivian Stephens and Veronica Mixon, respectively, started publishing love stories with BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) protagonists. Set in the authors’ time (and thus termed “contemporary” romance), the novels depict a range of BIPOC lives. Published between 1980 and 1988, this corpus also represents the earliest mass-market romances by American authors who were Black, Native American, and Latinx. These novels resulted from Stephens’ and Mixon’s desire for American romance to represent the cultural diversity of the United States and reflect the many strands of the country’s history and demographics. They also disrupt the extant white-centric story of American romance’s origins and reinstate its BIPOC pioneers in the genre’s history.