Lifestyle
8 hot new love stories from a stellar lineup of Black authors
When the Essence Festival of Culture celebrated its 30th anniversary in New Orleans earlier this month, organizers showcased a stellar lineup of Black romance authors — from trailblazing pioneers like Beverly Jenkins and Brenda Jackson to newer stars Kennedy Ryan, Natasha Bishop and Danielle Allen. In spite of barriers, optimistic, swoony love stories by African American authors are an increasingly sought-after commodity, as we’ve been tracking, finding audiences outside of traditional pathways.
This summer’s most exciting new releases take us from the streets of 1816 London to the NASA Space Center in Houston to Athens. The challenge is whittling your reading options down to a manageable number of contenders. Relying on bestseller lists, algorithms and TikTok means you might be missing some of the best the genre has to offer. Fortunately, we love the process of discovery. We’ve compiled a list of some hot new romance novels by Black authors, starting with a timely debut that finds readers at the Olympics.
Let the Games Begin
With the Paris games fast approaching in July, this Olympics set comedy is the perfect prelude. Rufaro Faith Mazarura is a British Zimbabwean writer making her debut with a story about two 20-somethings in Athens. Olivia and Zeke are British citizens and the high achieving offspring of Zimbabwean immigrants. She’s a focused college grad with a dream internship with the Olympics that she hopes to parlay into a permanent position. He’s Team Britain’s popular track star shooting for gold after previously earning silver. While they run headfirst into their attraction, neither one can afford the distraction. Vibe: Sweet and inspiring.
A Love Like the Sun
Beautifully blending beloved tropes and smooth, often lyrical prose, A Love Like The Sun by Riss M. Neilson, centers childhood friends fake dating their way toward a deeper connection. The magic of this convention is in the permission it conveys to go with attraction under the guise of doing it for show. “Always braver together,” Laniah and Issac have been ride-or-die besties since they were little. Now in their 20s, Laniah is struggling and Issac is GenZ’s perfect internet boyfriend: a mixed media artist/model /brand ambassador/influencer with an enviable online following and clout to spare. Part of his appeal is that “people love watching a beautiful shirtless man use his hands to make sculptures while listening to music.” The other ingredient is uniquely Issac: a sweet and handsome guy who “believes firmly in soulmates” and is in touch with the feminine perspective. Facing the loss of her business she runs with her mother, Laniah agrees to give her natural hair care business a boost through their “fake” romantic association. Along the way, the two lovers navigate challenges related to mental health, racial identity, grief, and a chronic illness. Heightening the tension, despite being bffs with an electric attraction, Laniah and Isaac are kind of opposites. She’s a hermit uncomfortable with public attention; he lives his life on the internet and his fans think they own him. I had a hard time letting go of these two! Vibe: Unabashedly swoony, angsty and pining.
A Gamble at Sunset
Blending history and fairy-tale like romance, Vanessa Riley’s latest centers a wealthy Black family teetering on the edge of ruin entangled with England’s most unusual duke. When the 19th-century Black daughters of a self-made “King of Coal” fake an engagement to avoid ruination, their champion is a duke connected to Russia’s Peter the Great. As grand as that sounds, like most of Riley’s work, the first novel in her “Betting Against the Duke” series is sweepingly romantic and grounded in the hidden Black figures of Europe’s past – real people, who, as Riley explains, defy expectations and are often forgotten. Marriage to a titled aristocrat was supposed to be the Wilcox sisters’ golden ticket to respectable London society. Instead, eldest sister Katherine’s noble husband, an inveterate gambler, lay waste to their fortune. On his deathbed, Viscount Hampton tries to turn his vice into virtue, challenging his long lost friend the Duke of Torrance to one last wager: “Jahleel. Bet . . . five pounds you can’t love ’em like I.” The plea draws the part Russian, part British, part African duke (a fictional descendant of the real Gen. Abram Gannibal) and his friend Lord Mark Sebastian close to the family. While the widowed Katherine spars with the duke, Sebastian is fascinated with middle sister Georgina. Mark and Georgina’s risky behavior leads to a fake engagement to save Georgina’s reputation, but there’s nothing false about their attraction. This is striking return to historical romance after Riley’s stint consulting for The Hallmark Channel’s multiracial adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and three critically praised novels including Island Queen. Vibe: Brontes meet Bridgerton: light on steam and high on thought-provoking twists and juicy drama.
The Kiss Countdown
In this sweet and steamy romance by first-time author Etta Easton, the sparks are undeniable as a nerdy, sexy astronaut enters into a mutually beneficial arrangement with an event planner in need of a fresh start. When Houstonite Amerie Price loses her boyfriend and her job in a dismally short space of time and runs into that ex at a cafe with his shiny new girlfriend, she’s so desperate to save face that she pretends to be dating the nearest handsome stranger. The cooperative bystander turns out to be a real life hero, who needs his own kind of rescue. Their town is home to the billion-dollar Johnson Center, NASA‘s Mission Control headquarters, and every guy in Houston seems to claim he’s an association. But Ahmad is really an astronaut. They strike up a friendship and a bargain– she’ll pretend to be his girlfriend to thwart his matchmaking mama while he preps for a major mission, and he’ll provide a rent-free refuge where she can get her event planning business off the ground. That win-win situation gets complicated when red hot attraction and feelings get involved. Vibe: Sweet and sexy — fake dating and close proximity are a stellar recipe for love.
A Little Kissing Between Friends
Chencia Higgins (The Vow and Wolves of West Texas) is a dynamic young writer who has amassed a following and a healthy backlist as an indie author of contemporary and paranormal romance. Her lauded traditionally published debut D’Vaughn and Kris Plan a Wedding featured two women faking an engagement and falling in love on a reality TV show. In A Little Kissing Between Friends, longtime friends are reluctant to risk their connection on a chance at love. Cyn is a successful Houston-based music producer with a big supportive family. Single mom “Jucee” Juleesa is the best friend Cyn has been crushing on. Having seen each other through health crises and breakups, there’s a lot on the line. That said, this is a quintessentially summery read — more heart and positive vibes than conflict. Vibe: Sweet and steamy. Undistilled Black joy.
Looking for Love in All the Haunted Places
At Hennessy House guests are greeted with five rules. One is a warning: “Do not explore the house for any reason.” To secure her dream job on the set of a haunted house reality show, Lucky Hart has to survive in the eerie dwelling, adhere to those five simple prohibitions, and avoid catching feelings for the show’s empathetic star Maverick Phillips. That’s easier said than done when “meeting him felt like the thrill of a lifetime.” Lucky is gifted; she has a kind of extra sensory perception that enables her to read people, and her reaction to him is shocking: “Hearing him say her name like that threatened to send her gasping into the afterlife. So strange. So bizarre. So dangerously against her nature that she felt a little lightheaded…” Claire Kann’s first adult contemporary romance, The Romantic Agenda, was equal parts poignant and frothy and frequently named as one of the best romances of 2022. A tender and specific writer with broad appeal, Kann explored the challenge of finding love when you’re deeply romantic and also asexual. Her new novel recreates that winning formula while adding a haunted house setting and magic to the mix. Vibe: Swoony and spooky.
Curvy Girl Summer
Indie publishing’s Black romance queen Danielle Allen is among the best and most beloved to wield a pen or laptop. Hotter than the sands of Negril, her first traditionally published novel delivers big — big spice, big hair, big hips, big laughs and BIG heart. More Michelle Buteau than Bridget Jones, Curvy Girl Summer is fat-positive and complicated. When IT professional Aaliyah makes it her mission to find a long term romantic partner and squash her family’s constant carping on her single status before her 30th birthday, her parade of dates are more comic relief than romantic connection. Great for a laugh; not so much for the heart. More and more, what she looks forward to is what happens after the dates are done: spending time with her favorite bartender and friend Ahmad. Vibe: Unabashedly sexy and grown. The literary Survival of The Thickest.
One and Done
Determined to be America’s first openly gay Black university president, the last thing Dr. Taylor James needed was a handsome, sharp-dressed diversion from his goals. A one time only, no-strings attached tryst is what the doctor wants, and the guy hitting on him at his usual brunch spot is giving all the wrong signals. Dustin McMillan is handsome, professional and complicated. He has a tortured relationship with the Oakland family he worked so hard to escape. But hiding that past cost him a chance with this man who seems tailor made for him. With this romance set in academia, author Frederick Smith is writing what he knows. By day he’s a senior university administrator and it shows in the convincing characterization of the workplace and consistently crisp writing. This Bay Area romance is addictive reading. Vibe: Deliciously messy. A wry grown-up take on academia by way of The Office: It’s Looking meets The Chair.
Carole V. Bell is a cultural critic, researcher of media, politics and identity, and co-host of Season Four of the Black Romance Podcast.
When Marian Sherry Lurio and Jonathan Buffington Nguyen met at a mutual friend’s wedding at Higgins Lake, Mich., in July 2022, both felt an immediate chemistry. As the evening progressed, they sat on the shore of the lake in Adirondack chairs under the stars, where they had their first kiss before joining others for a midnight plunge.
The two learned that the following weekend Ms. Lurio planned to attend a wedding in Philadelphia, where Mr. Nguyen lives, and before they had even exchanged numbers, they already had a first date on the books.
“I have a vivid memory of after we first met,” Mr. Nguyen said, “just feeling like I really better not screw this up.”
Before long, they were commuting between Philadelphia and New York City, where Ms. Lurio lives, spending weekends and the odd remote work days in one another’s apartments in Philadelphia and Manhattan. Within the first six months of dating, Mr. Nguyen joined Ms. Lurio’s family for Thanksgiving in Villanova, Pa., and, the following month, she met his family in Beavercreek, Ohio, at a surprise birthday party for Mr. Nguyen’s mother.
Ms. Lurio, 32, who grew up in Merion Station outside Philadelphia, works in investor relations administration at Flexpoint Ford, a private equity firm. She graduated from Dartmouth College with a bachelor’s degree in history and psychology.
Mr. Nguyen, also 32, was born in Knoxville, Tenn., and raised in Beavercreek, Ohio, from the age of 7. He graduated from Haverford College with a bachelor’s degree in political science and is now a director at Doyle Real Estate Advisors in Philadelphia.
Their long-distance relationship continued for the next few years. There were dates in Manhattan, vacations and beach trips to the Jersey Shore. They attended sporting events and discovered their shared appreciation of the 2003 film, “Love Actually.”
One evening, Mr. Nguyen recalled looking around Ms. Lurio’s small New York studio — strewed with clothes and the takeout meal they had ordered — and feeling “so comfortable and safe.” “I knew that this was something different than just sort of a fling,” he said.
It was an open question when they would move in together. In 2024, Ms. Lurio began the process of moving into Mr. Nguyen’s home in Philadelphia — even bringing her cat, Scott — but her plans changed midway when an opportunity arose to expand her role with her current employer.
Mr. Nguyen was on board with her decision. “It almost feels like stolen valor to call it ‘long distance,’ because it’s so easy from Philadelphia to New York,” Mr. Nguyen said. “The joke is, it’s easier to get to Philly from New York than to get to some parts of Brooklyn from Manhattan, right?”
In January 2025, Mr. Nguyen visited Ms. Lurio in New York with more up his sleeve than spending the weekend. Together they had discussed marriage and bespoke rings, but when Mr. Nguyen left Ms. Lurio and an unfinished cheese plate at the bar of the Chelsea Hotel that Friday evening, she had no idea what was coming next.
“I remember texting Jonathan,” Ms. Lurio said, bewildered: “‘You didn’t go toward the bathroom!’” When a Lobby Bar server came and asked her to come outside, Ms. Lurio still didn’t realize what was happening until she was standing in the hallway, where Mr. Nguyen stood recreating a key moment from the film “Love Actually,” in which one character silently professes his love for another in writing by flashing a series of cue cards. There, in the storied Chelsea Hotel hallway still festooned with Christmas decorations, Mr. Nguyen shared his last card that said, “Will you marry me?”
They wed on April 11 in front of 200 guests at the Pump House, a covered space on the banks of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River. Mr. Nguyen’s sister, the Rev. Elizabeth Nguyen, who is ordained through the Unitarian Universalist Association, officiated.
Although formal attire was suggested, Ms. Lurio said that the ceremony was “pretty casual.” She and Jonathan got ready together, and their families served as their wedding parties.
“I said I wanted a five-minute wedding,” Ms. Lurio recalled, though the ceremony ended up lasting a little longer than that. During the ceremony, Ms. Nguyen read a homily and jokingly added that guests should not ask the bride and groom about their living arrangements, which will remain separate for the foreseeable future.
While watching Ms. Lurio walk down the aisle, flanked by her parents, Mr. Nguyen said he remembered feeling at once grounded in the moment and also a sense of dazed joy: “Like, is this real? I felt very lucky in that moment — and also just excited for the party to start!”
He always texted when he was outside. No call, no knock. It was just a message and then the soft sound of my door opening. He moved like someone practiced in disappearing.
His name meant “complete” in Arabic, which is what I felt when we were together.
I met him the way you meet most things that matter in Los Angeles — without intending to. In our senior year at a college in eastern L.A. County, we were introduced through mutual friends, then thrown together by the particular gravity of people who recognized something in each other. He was a Muslim medical student, conservative and careful and funny in the dry, precise way of someone who has always had to choose his words. I was loud where he was quiet, messy where he was disciplined. I was out. He was not.
I understood, or thought I did. I thought that I couldn’t get hurt if I was completely conscious throughout the endeavor. Los Angeles has a way of making you feel like the whole world shares your freedoms — until you realize the city is enormous, and not all of it belongs to you in the same way.
For months, our world was confined to my apartment. He would slip in after dark, and we’d stay up late talking about his family in Iran, classical music and the particular pressure of being the son someone sacrificed everything to bring here. He told me things he said he’d never told anyone, and I believed him.
The orange glow from my Nesso lamp lit his face while the indigo sky pressed against the window behind him. In our small little world, we were safe. Outside was another matter.
On our first real date, I took him to the L.A. Phil’s “An Evening of Film & Music: From Mexico to Hollywood” program. I told him they were cheap seats even though they were the first row on the terrace. He was thrilled in the way only someone who doesn’t expect to be delighted actually gets delighted — fully, without guarding it. I put my arm around his shoulders. At some point, I shifted and moved it, and he nudged it back. He was OK with PDA here.
I remember thinking that wealth is a great barrier to harm and then feeling silly for extrapolating my own experience once again. Inside Walt Disney Concert Hall, we were just two people in love with the same music.
Outside was still another matter.
In February, on Valentine’s Day, he took me to a Yemeni restaurant in Anaheim. We hovered over saffron tea surrounded by other young Southern Californians, and we looked like friends. Before we went in, we sat in the parking lot of the strip mall — signs in Arabic advertising bread, coffee, halal meats, the Little Arabia District — hand in hand. I leaned over to kiss him.
“Not here,” he said. His eyes shifted furtively. “Someone might see.”
I understood, or told myself I did, but I was saddened. Later, after the kind of reflection that only arrives in the wreckage, I would understand something harder: I had been unconsciously asking him to choose, over and over, between the people he loved and the person he loved. I had a long pattern of choosing unavailable men, telling myself it was because I could handle the complexity. The truth was more embarrassing. I thought that if someone like him chose me anyway — chose me over the weight of societal expectations — it would mean I was worth choosing. It took me a long time to see how unfair that was to him and to me.
We went to the Norton Simon Museum together in November, on the kind of gray Pasadena day when the 210 Freeway roars in the background like white noise. He studied for the MCAT while I wrote a paper on Persian rugs. In between practice problems, he translated ancient Arabic scripts for me. I thought, “We make a good team.” Afterward, we walked through the galleries and he didn’t let go of my arm.
That was the version of us I kept returning to — when the ending came during Ramadan. It arrived as a spiritual reflection of my own. I texted: “Does this end at graduation — whatever we are doing?”
He thought I meant Ramadan. I did not mean Ramadan.
“I care about you,” he wrote, “but I don’t want you to think this could work out to anything more than just dating. I mean, of course, I’ve fantasized about marrying you. If I could live my life the way I wanted, of course I would continue. I’m just sad it’s not in this lifetime.”
I was in Mexico City when these texts were exchanged. That night I flew to Oaxaca to clear my head and then, after less than 24 hours, flew back to L.A. No amount of vacation would allow me to process what had just happened, so I threw myself back into work.
My therapist told me to use the conjunction “and” instead of “but.” It happened, and I am changed. The harm I caused and the love I felt. The beauty of what we made and the impossibility of where it could go. She gave me a knowing smile when I asked if it would stay with me forever. She didn’t answer, which was the answer.
I think about the freeways now, the way Joan Didion called them our only secular communion. When you’re on the ground in Los Angeles, the world narrows to the few blocks around you. Get on the freeway and you understand the whole body of the city at once: the arteries, the pulse, the scale of the thing.
You understand that you are a single cell in something enormous and moving. It is all out of your control. I am in a lane. The lane shaped how I drive. He was simply in a different lane, and his lane shaped him, and those two facts can coexist without either of us being the villain of the sad story.
He came like a secret in the night, and he left the same way. What we made in between was real and complicated and mine to hold forever, hoping we find each other in the next life.
The author lives in Los Angeles.
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
The art industry is increasingly shaped by artists’ and art businesses’ shared realization that they are locked in a fierce struggle for sustained attention — against each other, and against the rest of the overstimulated, always-online world. A major New York art fair aims to win this competition next month by knocking down the increasingly shaky walls between contemporary art and fashion.
When visitors enter the Independent art fair on May 14, they will almost immediately encounter its open-plan centerpiece: an installation of recent couture looks from Comme des Garçons. It will be the first New York solo presentation of works by Rei Kawakubo, the brand’s founder and mastermind, since a lauded 2017 survey exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.
Art fairs have often been front and center in the industry’s 21st-century quest to capture mindshare. But too many displays have pierced the zeitgeist with six-figure spectacles, like Maurizio Cattelan’s duct-taped banana and Beeple’s robot dogs. Curating Independent around Comme des Garçons comes from the conviction that a different kind of iconoclasm can rise to the top of New York’s spring art scrum.
Elizabeth Dee, the founder and creative director of Independent, said that making Kawakubo’s work the “nerve center” of this year’s edition was a “statement of purpose” for the fair’s evolution. After several years at the compact Spring Studios in TriBeCa, Independent will more than double its square footage by moving to Pier 36 at South Street, on the East River. Dee has narrowed the fair’s exhibitor list, to 76, from 83 dealers in 2025, and reduced booth fees to encourage a focus on single artists making bold propositions.
“Rei’s work has been pivotal to thinking about how my work as a curator, gallerist and art fair can push boundaries, especially during this extraordinary move toward corporatization and monoculture in the art world in the last 20 years,” Dee said.
Kawakubo’s designs have been challenging norms since her brand’s first Paris runway show in 1981, but her work over the last 13 years on what she calls “objects for the body” has blurred borders between high fashion and wearable sculpture.
The Comme des Garçons presentation at Independent will feature 20 looks from autumn-winter 2020 to spring-summer 2025. Forgoing the runway, Kawakubo is installing her non-clothing inside structures made from rebar and colored plastic joinery.
Adrian Joffe, the president of both Comme des Garçons International and the curated retailer Dover Street Market International (and who is also Kawakubo’s husband), said in an interview that Kawakubo’s intention was to create a sculptural installation divorced from chronology and fashion — “a thing made new again.”
Every look at Independent was made in an edition of three or fewer, but only one of each will be for sale on-site. Prices will be about $9,000 to $30,000. Comme des Garçons will retain 100 percent of the sales.
Asked why she was interested in exhibiting at Independent, the famously elusive Kawakubo said via email, “The body of work has never been shown together, and this is the first presentation in New York in almost 10 years.” Joffe added a broader philosophical motivation. “We’ve never done it before; it was new,” he said. Also essential was the fair’s willingness to embrace Kawakubo’s vision for the installation rather than a standard fair booth.
Kawakubo began consistently engaging with fine art decades before such crossovers became commonplace. Since 1989, she has invited a steady stream of contemporary artists to create installations in Comme des Garçons’s Tokyo flagship store. The ’90s brought collaborations with the artist Cindy Sherman and performance pioneer Merce Cunningham, among others.
More cross-disciplinary projects followed, including limited-release direct mailers for Comme des Garçons. Kawakubo designs each from documentation of works provided by an artist or art collective.
The display at Independent reopens the debate about Kawakubo’s proper place on the continuum between artist and designer. But the issue is already settled for celebrated artists who have collaborated with her.
“I totally think of Rei as an artist in the truest sense,” Sherman said by email. “Her work questions what everyone else takes for granted as being flattering to a body, questions what female bodies are expected to look like and who they’re catering to.”
Ai Weiwei, the subject of a 2010 Comme des Garçons direct mailer, agreed that Kawakubo “is, in essence, an artist.” Unlike designers who “pursue a sense of form,” he added, “her design and creation are oriented toward attitude” — specifically, an attitude of “rebellion.”
Also taking this position is “Costume Art,” the spring exhibition at the Costume Institute. Opening May 10, the show pairs individual works from multiple designers — including Comme des Garçons — with artworks from the Met’s holdings to advance the argument made by the dress code for this year’s Met gala: “Fashion is art.”
True to form, Kawakubo sometimes opts for a third way.
“Rei has often said she’s not a designer, she’s not an artist,” Joffe said. “She is a storyteller.”
Now to find out whether an art fair sparks the drama, dialogue and attention its authors want.
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