RWA: New Award, New Bankruptcy Filing

I haven't been following the Romance Writers of America's activities closely since the 2019 implosion (documented in detail on this blog, under the tag RWA, but also summarised more briefly here and here) and a brief return with the 2021 awards fiasco (again, documented on this blog, but also summarised more briefly here). However, today there were a couple of items of news concerning the RWA.

The first involved a change to their main award. An Internet Archive capture of 25 February outlines a

a significant development regarding THE VIVIAN® Award. With the encouragement of the award’s namesake, Vivian Stephens, the RWA Board of Directors has approved a new name for the published author’s contest – the Diamond Heart Award. The Board is excited about the positive impact this change will have as we continue to celebrate the extraordinary richness and variety of our genre. This decision reflects RWA’s dedication to fostering an environment that embraces the diverse voices and experiences within our romance writing family.

While this award undergoes a transformation, Vivian Stephens' name will remain closely tied to our community. Her legacy will continue to be honored through the dedicated RWA industry service award, recognizing her enduring contributions to our shared journey.

That page has been updated since then (and I've saved it the way it looks today here). The judges should have completed their training and "Wednesday, June 5, 2024 - The contest opens at 11 a.m."

However, it seems that today (29 May 2024) the RWA filed for bankruptcy. I haven't seen the details but Courtney Milan posted the following screenshot:

[Subsequently, predominantly due 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, membership decreased to approximately 3,000. Due to COVID concerns, the Debtor held its annual conference virtually in 2020 and 2021, and subsequently its membership reduced further. RWA was able to postpone its obligations to the respective Conference Centers these two years by agreeing to add two future years to the applicable Conference Centre Contract to 2028.]

Which, as has been pointed out, rather skates over the details of how and why Courtney Milan was treated very badly by the organisation.

If anyone has more in-depth knowledge of the situation, please do leave a comment!

[Edited to add:

Here's an article about the situation in Bloomberg Law.

Here's a post from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books which explains in rage and detail why the RWA's wording of their excuse is symptomatic of the very reasons the RWA is in this position.

And a similarly righteously angry, and also very detailed, post, at Her Hands My Hands.

The Guardian takes a closer look at the consequences of bankruptcy and pointedly concludes that

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.

The Guardian article states that "Reuters contributed reporting" which presumably refers to this article by Reuters, which begins with some cliches about the genre.]

CFP (on Sarah J. Maas), and lots of new publications (emotions, vasectomies, comics, deposit libraries, aro-ace romance, dance history)

The Journal of Popular Romance Studies has put out a call for papers for a

Special Issue: Sarah J. Maas

Millions of adolescent and adult readers alike have been drawn to Sarah J. Maas’s YA fantasy-romance series for their representations of empowered, embattled young women, their immersive fantasy worlds, and especially their romance narratives. From the Throne of Glass  (2012-18) and A Court of Thorns and Roses (2015-21) books to Crescent City (2020-24), her current series-in-progress, Maas has become wildly popular for the complex romantic and sexual relationships she portrays. The Journal of Popular Romance Studies (JPRS) seeks articles for a special issue focused on Maas’s fiction. These articles may focus on any of Maas’s works and may take a variety of disciplinary approaches.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

• Intersections of romance and politics, including connections between sexual agency and political agency in Maas’s fiction
• How Maas’s work engages with feminism and/or postfeminism
• Portrayals of or discourses on assault, trauma, and/or PTSD in Maas’s fiction and romance as trauma narrative
• Maas’s adaptation of fairy tales in her romance narratives
• Representations of sex and sexuality in Maas’s work
• Portrayals of gender in Maas’s work
• Maas’s engagement with traditional romance-genre tropes
• Renderings of adolescence and adult-youth power dynamics in romantic pairings and other relationships in Maas’s fiction
• Maas’s portrayal of LGBTQ+ or queer romantic relationships
• Class structures/dynamics and how they shape romance in Maas’s work

More details about this can be found here.

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Eirini Arvanitaki's Emotionality: Heterosexual Love and Emotional Development in Popular Romance was published by Routledge in May 2024. It

focuses on the projections of romantic love and its progression in a selection of popular romance novels and identifies an innovation within the genre’s formula and structure. Taking into account Giddens’s notion of ‘confluent’ love, this book argues that two forms of love exist within these texts: romantic and confluent love. The analysis of these love variants suggests that a continuum emerges which signifies the complexity but also the formation and progressive nature of the protagonists’ love relationships. This continuum is divided into three stages: the pre-personal, semi-personal and personal. The first phase connotes the introduction of the protagonists and describes the sexual attraction they experience for each other. The second phase refers to the initiation of the sexual interaction of the heroine and hero without any emotional involvement. The third and final phase begins when emotions such as jealousy, shame/guilt, anger, and self-sacrifice are awakened and acknowledged.

Allan, Jonathan A. (2024) '“Condoms Break. Birth Control Fails.” Heroes in the Procreative Realm and Jessica Scott’s “Anything for You”'. Journal of Popular Romance Studies 13.

Cho, H., Adkins, D., da Silva Santos, D., Long, A.K. (2024). "Platform, Visuals, and Sound: Webtoon’s Immersive Romance Reading Engagement." In: Sserwanga, I., et al. Wisdom, Well-Being, Win-Win. iConference 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14597. Springer, Cham. [More details here.]

Deane, Katie (2024). Romance Self-Publishing and UK Legal Deposit. British Library Research Repository.

Lienhard, Alissa (2024). "“I’ll Call it Platonic Magic”: Queer Joy, Metafiction, and Aro-Ace Autofictional Selves in Alice Oseman’s Loveless." In Progress: A Graduate Journal of North American Studies 2.1:59-72.

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And finally, although this is not a publication about romance, Sonia Gollance, advertising her new book  It Could Lead to Dancing: Mixed-Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity, has written a post about some of what you could expect to find if there were more historical romances written about Jewish protagonists. https://jwa.org/blog/scandalous-dance-scenes-romance-plots-and-jewish-literary-modernity

 

New Publications: Genre Norms, Publishing and Creators

Green, Steff (2024). "More schlongs, more cats." Otherhood: Essays on being childless, childfree and child-adjacent. Ed. Kathryn Van Beek, Alie Benge, Lil O'Brien. Aukland: Massey University Press. [On the near-ubiquity of babies in the HEA. Excerpt here.]

 

Griffiths, David (2023). Hearing Ghosts: Writing a Low Fantasy YA Gothic Fiction for young adult males. PhD in Creative Writing, Manchester Metropolitan University.

McInnis, Lauren (2024). Filing The Serial Numbers Off: The Role Of The Author In Fanfiction Published As Original FictionFanfiction Published As Original Fiction. Master of Arts dissertation, University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Parisot, Eric (2024). Jane Austen and Vampires: Love, Sex and Immortality in the New Millennium. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. [More details here, and excerpt here.]

Pierre-Robertson, Petronetta (2023). "Librarian as Creator." Caribbean Library Journal 7:1-16.

Sabo, Oana (2024). “Translingualism 2.0.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 28.2: 302-316. [Links, and selected quotes from the section on romance, here.]