Beverly JENKINS
With more than 40 titles to her name, including bestsellers such as Indigo, Topaz, and the Blessings series, Beverly Jenkins is nothing short of a superstar in Romancelandia. The activity on her multiple Facebook pages/groups and among her 18K+ Twitter fans is evidence of that. When I comment that the kindness and generosity of the folks participating was somewhat antithetical to most of Twitter, Jenkins isn’t the least bit surprised.
“They’re the best,” she says about her readers. There’s “a lot of sharing, a lot of uplifting.” But anyone who’s had even the briefest of encounters with her knows this is thanks, at least in part, to the positivity she puts into the world. Her love stories, ranging from historical, to contemporary, to young adult, and inspirational, don’t just offer the requisite HEA (happily ever after)—they feature communities of people helping and supporting one another.
Jenkins’ success is undeniable. She’s the recipient of the Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award, a Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award, and has been nominated for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in fiction. But her first novel, Night Song (1994), wasn’t guaranteed. Happy in her career as a librarian, Jenkins wrote the book for herself—to see characters that looked like her represented in stories not based on slavery—which meant veering from the status quo of the romance publishing industry. She claims she got enough rejection letters to “paper my kitchen and yours” but she kept going.
Her first novel was also her first (but certainly not last) to include a bibliography of references. Many of her characters are inspired by or based on real people and the inclusion of source material has an important function for Jenkins. Reading her books was the first time I’d seen romances with bibliographies, so that’s where our conversation began.
You’re known as a romance writer, but your historical romances have a surprising amount of content about little-known historical events. I personally found myself learning about things I had never heard of before. Why did you decide to take that
