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WORK TITLE: Stacey Speaks Up
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WEBSITE: https://staceyabrams.com
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COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME:
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PERSONAL
Born December 9, 1973, in Madison, WI; daughter of Robert and Carolyn Abrams.
EDUCATION:Spelman College, B.A., 1995; University of Texas, Austin, M.P.A., 1998; Yale University, J.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, attorney, activist, and politician. City of Atlanta, GA, deputy attorney, beginning 2002; Sutherland Asbill & Brennan, Atlanta, GA, tax attorney; Georgia House of Representatives, Atlanta, representative, 2007-17, minority leader, 2011-17; Nourish, Inc., Atlanta, GA, cofounder, 2010; Howard University, Washington, DC, Ronald W. Walters Endowed Chair for Race and Black Politics; Sage Works Productions, Atlanta, GA, founder, 2020; Rewiring America, Washington, DC, senior counsel, 2023—. Founder of activist organizations, including Fair Fight Action and NOWaccount Network Corporation.
AWARDS:NAACP, 2021-23.
POLITICS: DemocratWRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Stacey Abrams is a writer, entrepreneur, activist and politician. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Superman College, a master’s degree from the University of Texas, Austin, and a law degree from Yale University. After earning her law degree, Abrams worked as an attorney for the City of Atlanta before joining the Atlanta law firm, Sutherland Asbill & Brennan as a tax attorney. She began serving as a representative in the Georgia House of Representatives, becoming minority leader in 2011. After leaving the state’s House of Representatives in 2017, Abrams ran for governor but lost to Brian Kemp. In addition to her careers in politics and law, Abrams also founded a food and beverage brand called Nourish, a production company called Sage Works Productions, and the activist organizations, Fair Fight Action and NOWaccount Network Corporation. She has served as a faculty member at Howard University.
Meanwhile, Abrams has written over a dozen books in a variety of genres, from nonfiction volumes to thrillers to romance novels, the last of which were written under the pseudonym, Selena Montgomery. In an interview with Kayla Grant, contributor to the Shondaland website, Abrams discussed the connection between all her books, stating: “My writing is based on who I am and who I want to be. Whether I’m writing about an artist or about a lost kingdom, [or] about ethnobotany or chemical physics, I want not only the reader to see and learn, but [also] the reader to see and accept that we contain multitudes. Literature’s purpose is to do that.”
Abrams is also the author of the children’s book series, “Stacey’s Stories.” In the first volume of the series, Stacey’s Extraordinary Words, Abrams introduces a version of her younger self. Young Stacey participates in a spelling bee and narrowly loses to the class bully. However, Stacey does not give up on spelling and devotes herself to practicing for the next spelling bee, which she ultimately wins. Meanwhile, she learns about how one can use words to help others. “This engaging, edifying, delightfully nerdy childhood retrospective from one of today’s inspirational leaders speaks volumes,” asserted a contributor to Kirkus Reviews. Connie Fletcher, reviewer in Booklist, described the volume as “charming and powerful.”
In Stacey’s Remarkable Books, young Stacey befriends a new classmate, Julie, who is original from Vietnam. Stacey and Julie begin frequenting the library together to read books, while Stacey helps Julie gain confidence reading in English. Soon, they form a group with other immigrant children, facilitated by school librarian Mr. McCormick. In an interview with Randi Richardson, contributor to the Today website, Abrams discussed the inspiration behind the book, stating: “(The book is) an homage to both of my parents: My mom, who made sure we understood the magic of a library. And my dad, who fought to be able to read and at the age of 30 basically taught himself to read prolifically because it was so important to him. That’s what I want kids and their parents to take from this book—that there is a universe out there, and we just have to go and find it.” A writer in Kirkus Reviews noted that the book contained “a worthy message delivered with a generous dose of inclusivity.”
The third volume in the series, Stacey Speaks Up, finds young Stacey becoming saddened when she realizes that some of her elementary school classmates are unable to afford school lunches. Stacey summons the courage to address the school board and ask them to provide free lunches at her school. Though she is initially rebuffed, Stacey does not give up and eventually succeeds in influencing the school board. A Kirkus Reviews critic described the book as “a blueprint for effective social action: simple, savvy, and tried and often true.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 15, 2018, Valerie Hawkins, review of Minority Leader: How to Lead from the Outside and Make Real Change, p. 5; April 1, 2021, Lesley Williams, review of While Justice Sleeps, p. 30; January 1, 2022, Connie Fletcher, review of Stacey’s Extraordinary Words, p. 81; February 1, 2022, Jennifer Michaelson, review of Live Up: Rise above the Hidden Forces Holding Your Business Back, p. 5; August 1, 2022, Keira Soleore, review of Rules of Engagement, p. 35; April 1, 2023, Lesley Williams, review of Rogue Justice, p. 30.
Economist, May 15, 2021, “The Character Arc of Justice: Politics and Fiction,” review of While Justice Sleeps, p. 73; October 13, 2022, “A Conversation with Stacey Abrams,” author interview.
Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2020, review of Our Time Is Now;February 15, 2021, review of While Justice Sleeps; January 1, 2022, review of Stacey’s Extraordinary Words; February 1, 2022, review of Speak Up, Speak Out; February 15, 2022, review of Level Up; October 1, 2022, review of Rules of Engagement; December 1, 2022, review of Stacey’s Remarkable Books;May 15, 2023, review of Rogue Justice; August 1, 2024, review of Stacey Speaks Up; December 1, 2024, review of Power of Persuasion.
Marie Claire, Brittany Cooper, “Stacey Abrams Is Just Getting Started,” author interview, p. 134.
National Review, May 3, 2021, Richard Lowry, “Stacey Abrams, Fount of Disinformation: She Says There’s a New Jim Crow; Here’s the Truth,” review of Our Time Is Now, p. 19.
New York Times Book Review, May 5, 2019, David Marchese, “Why Stacey Abrams Is Still Saying She Won,” author interview, p. 16; June 21, 2020, Tayari Jones, “Try This at Home,” review of Our Time Is Now, p. 11; May 9, 2021, author interview, p. 6; June 6, 2021, Richard North Patterson, “Full Court Press,” review of While Justice Sleeps, p. 16.
Publishers Weekly, March 29, 2021, Elaine Szewczyk, “Power Player: Voting Rights Activist, Politician, and Onetime Romance Author Stacey Abrams Is on to Something New with Her First Legal Thriller,” author interview, p. 57.
Wired, October, 2020, “An Interview With Stacey Abrams,” p. 60.
ONLINE
National Public Radio, Morning Edition website, https://www.npr.org/ (May 23, 2023), Michel Martin, author interview.
Shondaland, https://www.shondaland.com/ (September 5, 2023), Kayla Grant, author interview.
Stacey Abrams website, https://www.staceyabrams.com/ (March 4, 2025).
Today Online, https://www.today.com/ (December 14, 2022), Randi Richardson, author interview.
Stacey is the five-time New York Times bestselling author of Stacey’s Extraordinary Words, Rogue Justice, While Justice Sleeps, Our Time is Now and Lead from the Outside. Under the nom de plume, Selena Montgomery, she also penned eight romantic suspense novels including Rules of Engagement and The Art of Desire.
Stacey Speaks Up, her latest book, is the third book in the #1 New York Times bestselling and NAACP Image Award-winning Stacey’s Stories picture book series illustrated by artist Kitt Thomas.
All of Stacey’s books are available for purchase on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, and your local bookstore. You can order Stacey Speaks Up here. (Photo Credit: Ari Strauss)
“Writing is a pivotal part of how I think about the work that I need to do. Telling stories allows me to delve into other worlds and think about how the world affects other people.”
Stacey Abrams
Stacey Abrams is a New York Times bestselling author, entrepreneur, producer and political leader. She served eleven years in the Georgia House of Representatives, seven as minority leader, and was the first Black woman to become the gubernatorial nominee for a major party in United States history.
Rooted in values instilled by her parents and the belief that her job is to do as much good as she can, Stacey works to open doors of possibility and create solutions, opportunities and strategies that help others transform their potential into power.
Dedicated to expanding possibility and progress for current and future generations, Stacey has founded several solution-driven entities spanning the impact, for-profit, and entertainment sectors.
As a non-profit founder, Stacey has launched multiple organizations devoted to voting rights, training and hiring young people of color, and tackling social and economic issues at the state and national levels, including Fair Fight Action, Fair Count, the Southern Economic Advancement Project and the American Pride Rises Network.
Stacey co-founded the financial services firm NOWaccount Corp., Insomnia Consulting with a focus on infrastructure and energy, the beverage company Nourish, Inc., and she launched the production company, Sage Works Productions, Inc., in 2020. She currently serves as the Ronald W. Walters Endowed Chair for Race and Black Politics at Howard University and is a senior counsel to Rewiring America. Stacey has been nominated for an Emmy Award, and her projects have received the NAACP Image Awards in 2021, 2022 and 2023; her award-winning documentary, All In: The Fight for Democracy, was shortlisted for the Academy Awards in 2020. She is the author of political thrillers, romantic suspense, leadership and business nonfiction, civic engagement and children's books.
Stacey sits on both nonprofit and corporate boards and is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations. A tax attorney by training, she holds degrees from Spelman College, the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, and Yale Law School.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Stacey Abrams
Abrams in 2021
Minority Leader of the Georgia House of Representatives
In office
January 10, 2011 – July 1, 2017
Preceded by DuBose Porter
Succeeded by Bob Trammell
Member of the Georgia House of Representatives
In office
January 8, 2007 – August 25, 2017
Preceded by JoAnn McClinton
Succeeded by Bee Nguyen
Constituency 84th district (2007–2013)
89th district (2013–2017)
Personal details
Born Stacey Yvonne Abrams
December 9, 1973 (age 51)
Madison, Wisconsin, U.S.
Political party Democratic
Relatives Leslie Abrams Gardner (sister)
Residence(s) Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.
Education
Spelman College (BA)
University of Texas, Austin (MPA)
Yale University (JD)
Website Official website
Abrams's voice
Duration: 3 minutes and 1 second.3:01
Abrams on her 2018 gubernatorial campaign.
Recorded February 23, 2018
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Stacey Yvonne Abrams (/ˈeɪbrəmz/;[1] born December 9, 1973) is an American politician, lawyer, voting rights activist, and author who served in the Georgia House of Representatives from 2007 to 2017, serving as minority leader from 2011 to 2017.[2] A member of the Democratic Party, Abrams founded Fair Fight Action, an organization to address voter suppression, in 2018.[3] Her efforts have been widely credited with boosting voter turnout in Georgia, including in the 2020 presidential election, when Joe Biden narrowly won the state, and in Georgia's 2020–21 regularly scheduled and special U.S. Senate elections, which gave Democrats control of the Senate.[4][5][6]
Abrams was the Democratic nominee in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election, becoming the first African-American female major-party gubernatorial nominee in the United States.[7] She lost the election to Republican candidate Brian Kemp by a narrow margin of 1.4%. In February 2019, Abrams became the first African-American woman to deliver a response to the State of the Union address. She was the Democratic nominee in the 2022 Georgia gubernatorial election, and lost again to Kemp, this time by a much larger margin of 7.5%.
Abrams is an author of both fiction and nonfiction. Her nonfiction books, Our Time Is Now and Lead from the Outside, were New York Times best sellers. Abrams wrote eight fiction books under the pen name Selena Montgomery before 2021. While Justice Sleeps was released on May 11, 2021, under her real name. Abrams also wrote a children's book, Stacey's Extraordinary Words, released in December 2021.
Early life and education
The second of six siblings, Abrams was born to Robert and Carolyn Abrams in Madison, Wisconsin, and raised in Gulfport, Mississippi where her father was employed in a shipyard and her mother was a librarian.[8][9][10] In 1989, the family moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where her parents pursued graduate divinity degrees at Emory University.[11][12] They became Methodist ministers and later returned to Mississippi with their three youngest children while Abrams and two other siblings remained in Atlanta.[11][13][14] She attended Avondale High School, graduating as valedictorian in 1991.[15] In 1990, she was selected for the Telluride Association Summer Program.[16] At 17, while still in high school, she was hired as a typist for a congressional campaign and then as a speechwriter based on the improvements she made to a campaign speech.[17]
In 1995, Abrams earned a Bachelor of Arts in interdisciplinary studies (political science, economics, and sociology) from Spelman College, magna cum laude.[2] While in college, she worked in the youth services department in the office of Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson.[17] She later interned at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.[17] As a freshman in 1992, Abrams took part in a protest on the steps of the Georgia Capitol, during which she joined in burning the Georgia state flag which, at the time, incorporated the Confederate battle flag. It had been added to the state flag in 1956 as an anti-civil rights movement action.[18][19][20]
As a Harry S. Truman Scholar, Abrams studied public policy at the University of Texas at Austin's LBJ School of Public Affairs, where she earned a Master of Public Affairs degree in 1998. Afterward, she earned a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School.[2]
Legal and business career
After graduating from law school, Abrams worked as a tax attorney at the Sutherland Asbill & Brennan law firm in Atlanta, with a focus on tax-exempt organizations, health care, and public finance.[2] In 2010, while a member of the Georgia General Assembly, Abrams co-founded and served as the senior vice president of NOW Corp. (formerly NOWaccount Network Corporation), a financial services firm.[21][22]
Abrams is CEO of Sage Works, a legal consulting firm that has represented clients including the Atlanta Dream of the Women's National Basketball Association.[23]
Nourish and Now
Abrams co-founded Nourish, Inc. in 2010.[24] Originally conceived as a beverage company with a focus on infants and toddlers,[25] it was later rebranded as Now and pivoted its business model to an invoicing solution for small businesses. Now raised a $9.5 million Series A in 2021.[24]
Rewiring America
In mid-March 2023, community electrification advocacy nonprofit group Rewiring America announced it had hired Abrams as senior counsel.[26][27]
Political career
In 2002, at age 29, Abrams was appointed a deputy city attorney for the City of Atlanta.[2][28]
Georgia General Assembly
In 2006, Abrams ran for the 84th District for the Georgia House of Representatives, following JoAnn McClinton's announcement that she would not seek reelection. Abrams ran in the Democratic Party primary election against former state legislator George Maddox and political operative Dexter Porter. She outraised her two opponents and won the primary election with 51% of the vote, avoiding a runoff election.[29]
Abrams in 2012
Abrams represented House District 84 beginning in the 2007 session,[30] and beginning in the 2013 session (following reapportionment), District 89. Both districts covered portions of the City of Atlanta and unincorporated DeKalb County,[31] covering the communities of Candler Park, Cedar Grove, Columbia, Druid Hills, Edgewood, Highland Park, Kelley Lake, Kirkwood, Lake Claire, South DeKalb, Toney Valley, and Tilson.[32][33] She served on the Appropriations, Ethics, Judiciary Non-Civil, Rules, and Ways & Means committees.[34]
In November 2010, the Democratic caucus elected Abrams to succeed DuBose Porter as minority leader over Virgil Fludd.[35] Abrams's first major action as minority leader was to cooperate with Republican governor Nathan Deal's administration to reform the HOPE Scholarship program. She co-sponsored the 2011 legislation that preserved the HOPE program by decreasing the scholarship amount paid to Georgia students and funded a 1% low-interest loan program for students.[36]
According to Time magazine, Abrams "can credibly boast of having single-handedly stopped the largest tax increase in Georgia history."[37] In 2011 Abrams argued that a Republican proposal to cut income taxes while increasing a tax on cable service would lead to a net increase in taxes paid by most people.[37] She performed an analysis of the bill that showed that 82% of Georgians would see net tax increases, and left a copy of the analysis on the desk of every House legislator.[37] The bill subsequently failed.[37]
Abrams with John Lewis in 2017
Abrams also worked with Deal on criminal-justice reforms that reduced prison costs without increasing crime,[37] and with Republicans on the state's biggest-ever public transportation funding package.[37]
On August 25, 2017, Abrams resigned from the General Assembly to focus on her gubernatorial campaign.[38]
2018 gubernatorial campaign
Main article: 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election
Stacey Abrams campaigns in 2018 for Governor of Georgia.
Wikinews has related news:
Stacey Abrams becomes first black woman to gain major U.S. party nomination for governor of Georgia
Abrams ran for governor of Georgia in 2018.[39] In the Democratic primary she ran against Stacey Evans, another member of the Georgia House of Representatives,[39] in what some called "the battle of the Staceys". Abrams was endorsed by Bernie Sanders and Our Revolution.[40][41] On May 22, she won the Democratic nomination, making her the first Black woman in the U.S. to be a major party's nominee for governor.[7] After winning the primary, Abrams secured a number of high-profile endorsements, including one from former president Barack Obama.[42][43]
Almost a week before election day, the Republican nominee, Georgia secretary of state Brian Kemp, canceled a debate scheduled seven weeks earlier to attend a Trump rally. Kemp blamed Abrams for the cancellation, saying she was unwilling to reschedule it. Abrams's campaign manager responded, "We refuse to callously take Georgians for granted and cancel on them. Just because Brian Kemp breaks his promises doesn't mean anyone else should."[44]
Two days before the election, Kemp's office announced that it was investigating the Georgia Democratic Party for unspecified "possible cybercrimes"; the Georgia Democratic Party stated that "Kemp's scurrilous claims are 100 percent false" and described them as a "political stunt".[45] A 2020 investigation by the Georgia attorney general's office concluded that there was no evidence of computer crimes.[46] Later that year, it was revealed that the alleged cybercrime against Kemp's office was in fact a planned security test that one of Kemp's staff members had signed off on three months prior.[47]
As Georgia's secretary of state, Kemp was in charge of elections and voter registration during the election. Kemp was accused of voter suppression during the election between him and Abrams.[48][49][50] Emory University professor Carol Anderson has criticized Kemp as an "enemy of democracy" and "an expert in voter suppression" for his actions as secretary of state.[51] Political scientists Michael Bernhard and Daniel O'Neill described Kemp's actions in the 2018 gubernatorial election as the worst case of voter suppression in that election year.[52] Election law expert Richard L. Hasen called Kemp "perhaps the most incompetent state chief elections officer" in the 2018 elections, pointing to a number of actions that jeopardized Georgia's election security and made it harder for eligible voters to vote.[53] Hasen writes that it was "hard to tell" which of Kemp's "actions were due to incompetence and which were attempted suppression."[53]
Between 2012 and 2018, Kemp's office canceled over 1.4 million voter registrations, with nearly 700,000 cancellations in 2017 alone.[54] On a single night in July 2017, half a million voters had their registrations canceled. According to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, election-law experts said that this "may represent the largest mass disenfranchisement in US history."[55] Kemp oversaw the removals as secretary of state, and did so eight months after he declared his candidacy for governor.[56] An investigative journalism group run by Greg Palast found that of the approximately 534,000 Georgians whose voter registrations were purged between 2016 and 2017, more than 334,000 still lived where they were registered.[57] The voters were given no notice that they had been purged.[58] Palast sued Kemp, claiming over 300,000 voters were purged illegally.[59] Kemp's office denied any wrongdoing, saying that by "regularly updating our rolls, we prevent fraud and ensure that all votes are cast by eligible Georgia voters."[60]
Abrams in 2018
By early October 2018, more than 53,000 voter registration applications had been put on hold by Kemp's office, with more than 75% belonging to minorities.[61][54] The voters were eligible to re-register if they still lived in Georgia.[62][54][56][57]
In a ruling against Kemp, district judge Amy Totenberg found that Kemp's office had violated the Help America Vote Act and said an attempt by Kemp's office to expedite the certification of results "appears to suggest the secretary's foregoing of its responsibility to confirm the accuracy of the results prior to final certification, including the assessment of whether serious provisional balloting count issues have been consistently and properly handled."[63][64]
On November 6, 2018, Abrams lost the election by 54,723 votes.[65] On November 16, 2018, Abrams announced that she was ending her campaign. She emphasized that her statement was not a concession, because "concession means to acknowledge an action is right, true, or proper", but acknowledged that she could not close the gap with Kemp to force a runoff.[66] In her campaign-ending speech, Abrams announced the creation of Fair Fight Action, a voting rights nonprofit organization that sued the secretary of state and state election board in federal court for voter suppression.[67] Fair Fight was supported by Jess Moore Matthews and her Backbone Digital Leaders and others committed to ensuring full representation[68]
Fair Fight's lawsuit was initiated in December 2018; according to Politico, it "started as a sprawling case that included allegations of unreasonably long lines and wait times caused by moving and closing polling places; the impact of voter ID rules on people of color, voters with non-Anglo Saxon names and newly naturalized citizens; improper maintenance of Georgia's voter rolls; inadequate training of poll workers; and even the integrity of voting machines".[69] Six months after the lawsuit began, the Georgia legislature passed a law addressing some of its claims, with measures including the implementation of new voting machines with more advanced technology.[70] Fair Fight dropped the claims about voting machines in December 2020, around the time that Donald Trump made baseless claims about voting machine problems in Georgia affecting the 2020 presidential election.[69] In February 2021, a federal judge ruled that Fair Fight's claims about voting machines, voter list security, and polling place issues were resolved by changes in Georgia's election law, or invalidated due to lack of standing to sue.[70][71]
In April 2021, a judge allowed some claims in the legal challenge to proceed while rejecting others.[70] In October 2022, a federal judge ruled against Fair Fight on the remaining claims, finding that Georgia's voting regulations did not violate the Constitution or the Voting Rights Act.[72][73][74] According to the judge, the case "resulted in wins and losses for all parties over the course of the litigation and culminated in what is believed to have been the longest voting rights bench trial in the history of the Northern District of Georgia."[69][75][76] Over the course of the lawsuit, Fair Fight raised $61 million and paid millions to Allegra Lawrence-Hardy, Abrams's campaign chair.[69]
Since losing the election, Abrams has repeatedly said that the election was not fairly conducted[77] and has declined to call Kemp the legitimate governor of Georgia.[78] Abrams has since said that she won the election and that the election was "stolen from the voters of Georgia", claims that election law expert Richard L. Hasen said were unproven, though he argued that "it's clear that Kemp did everything in his power to put in place restrictive voting policies that would help his candidacy and hurt his opponent, all while overseeing his own election."[79] Abrams argued that Kemp, who oversaw the election in his role as secretary of state, had a conflict of interest and suppressed turnout by purging nearly 670,000 voter registrations in 2017, and that about 53,000 voter registrations were pending a month before the election.[77][80] She has said, "I have no empirical evidence that I would have achieved a higher number of votes. However, I have sufficient and I think legally sufficient doubt about the process to say that it was not a fair election."[77]
On November 9, 2018, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that its investigation of the 2018 statewide elections in Georgia had found "no evidence ... of systematic malfeasance – or of enough tainted votes to force a runoff election".[81] A USA Today fact check noted that the actions Kemp's office took during the election "can be explained as routine under state and federal law"; political scientist Charles S. Bullock III said there is "not much empirical evidence supporting the assertion that Kemp either suppressed the vote or 'stole' the election from Abrams."[82]
According to Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler, Abrams has variously claimed that she "won" the election, that the election was "rigged", that it was "stolen", that it was not "free and fair", and that Kemp had "cheated". Kessler said that "Abrams played up claims the election was stolen until such tactics became untenable for anyone who claims to be an advocate for American democratic norms and values".[83]
Role in federal politics
Stacey Abrams and Nancy Pelosi in January 2019
On January 29, 2019, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) announced that Abrams would deliver the response to the State of the Union address on February 5.[84] She was the first African-American woman to give the rebuttal to the address, as well as the first and only non-office-holding person to do so since the State of the Union responses began in 1966.[85] Despite being heavily recruited by Schumer, the Democratic National Committee, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to challenge incumbent senator David Perdue, on April 30, 2019, Abrams announced that she would not run for the U.S. Senate in 2020.[86] After Senator Johnny Isakson announced his resignation due to poor health, Abrams declined to run in that election as well, citing a need to focus on ending voter suppression.
On August 17, 2019, Abrams announced the founding of Fair Fight 2020,[87] an organization to assist Democrats financially and technically to build voter protection teams in 20 states.[88] Abrams is Fair Fight Action 2020's chair.[89] Billionaire and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg contributed $5 million shortly after announcing his run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.[90][91] On ABC's The View, Abrams defended Bloomberg's spending, saying: "Every person is allowed to run and should run the race that they think they should run, and Mike Bloomberg has chosen to use his finances. Other people are using their dog, their charisma, their whatever."[92] Abrams declined to endorse Bloomberg personally.[93]
During the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, Abrams actively promoted herself for consideration as former vice president Joe Biden's running mate.[94] Kamala Harris was officially announced as Biden's running mate on August 11, 2020.[95] Abrams was selected as one of 17 speakers to jointly deliver the keynote address at the 2020 Democratic National Convention.[96]
After Biden won the 2020 U.S. presidential election, both The New York Times and The Washington Post credited Abrams with a large boost in Democratic votes in Georgia and an estimated 800,000 new voter registrations.[6][97] As part of that election, she served as an elector for the state of Georgia.[98]
2022 gubernatorial campaign
Main article: 2022 Georgia gubernatorial election
On December 1, 2021, Abrams announced she would run again for governor of Georgia.[99] She ran unopposed in the Democratic primary on May 24, 2022, and faced Georgia governor Brian Kemp in the November 8 general election.[100] Abrams and Kemp had their first of two scheduled debates on October 17. In the debate, Abrams emphasized her support for gun control and legal access to abortion, while Kemp emphasized Georgia's economy under his governorship and his anti-crime proposals.[101] When asked whether she would accept the results of the election, Abrams declined to directly respond.[102] In the final debate before the election both candidates agreed to accept the results.[103] Abrams lost the November 8, 2022 election to Kemp; she conceded that night.[104]
Political positions
Abrams supports abortion rights, advocates for expanded gun control, and opposes proposals for stricter voter ID laws. She has argued that some implementations of voter ID laws disenfranchise minorities and the poor,[105][106] but does not oppose voter ID laws in principle and supports voters having to verify their identities.[107][108] Abrams pledged to oppose legislation similar to the religious liberty bill that Governor Deal vetoed in 2016.[109][110]
Criminal justice reform
Abrams supports criminal justice reform in the form of no cash bail for poor defendants, abolishing the death penalty, and decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana.[105][111] She also supports community policing to keep communities safe as part of criminal justice reform.[112]
Education
Abrams would like to increase spending on public education.[37] She opposes private school vouchers, instead advocating improvements to the public education system. She supports smaller class sizes, more school counselors, protected pensions, better pay for teachers, and expanded early childhood education.[113]
Health care
In her campaign for governor, Abrams said her top priority was Medicaid expansion.[37][114] She cited research showing that Medicaid expansion improved health care access for low-income residents and made hospitals in rural locations financially viable.[114] She also created a plan to address Georgia's high maternal mortality rate.[115]
Israeli–Palestinian conflict
Abrams is a strong supporter of Israel and rejects "the demonization and delegitimization of Israel represented" by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, which she has called "anti-Semitic".[116][117] However, she voted against Georgia's anti-BDS legislation that punishes companies that choose to boycott Israel or Israeli-occupied territories.[118] Abrams wrote, "Boycotts have been a critical part of social justice in American history, particularly for African-Americans. As the Anti-Defamation League notes, the origin of BDS is based in the anti-apartheid movement."[116]
Writing career
Outside of politics, Abrams has found success as a fiction writer. Until 2021, she published her works under the pen name Selena Montgomery. She claims to have sold more than 100,000 copies of her novels.[34] She wrote her first novel during her third year at Yale Law School and published her most recent book in 2009.[119] Her legal thriller While Justice Sleeps was published (under her own name) in May 2021.[120] An adaptation of the novel into a television series began development by Working Title Films, a subsidiary of Universal Pictures in 2021.[121][122] Her writing career and her political career connect through the fundraising event that she inspired, Romancing the Runoff, where romance authors raised funds for voting rights in Georgia.[123]
Two of her nonfiction works, Our Time is Now and Lead from the Outside, were New York Times best sellers.[124]
Abrams has published articles on public policy, taxation, and nonprofit organizations.[125] She is the author of Minority Leader: How to Lead from the Outside and Make Real Change (published by Henry Holt & Co. in April 2018),[126] and Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America (published by Henry Holt & Co. in June 2020).[127]
Honors and awards
In 2012, Abrams received the John F. Kennedy New Frontier Award from the Kennedy Library and Harvard University's Institute of Politics, which honors an elected official under 40 whose work demonstrates the impact of elective public service as a way to address public challenges.[128] In 2014 Governing Magazine named her a Public Official of the Year, an award that recognizes state and local official for outstanding accomplishments.[129] Abrams was recognized as one of "12 Rising Legislators to Watch" by the same publication in 2012[130] and one of the "100 Most Influential Georgians" by Georgia Trend for 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017.[131]
EMILY's List recognized Abrams as the inaugural recipient of the Gabrielle Giffords Rising Star Award in 2014.[132] She was selected as an Aspen Rodel Fellow[133] and a Hunt-Kean Fellow.[134] In 2014, Abrams was named 11th most influential African American aged 25 to 45 by The Root, rising to first place in 2019.[135][136] Abrams was named Legislator of the Year by the Georgia Alliance of Community Hospitals, Public Servant of the Year by the Georgia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, Outstanding Public Service by the Latin American Association, Champion for Georgia Cities by the Georgia Municipal Association, and Legislator of the Year by the DeKalb County Chamber of Commerce.[137]
Abrams received the Georgia Legislative Service Award from the Association County Commissioners Georgia, the Democratic Legislator of the Year from the Young Democrats of Georgia and Red Clay Democrats, and an Environmental Leader Award from the Georgia Conservation Voters.[137] She is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations,[138] a Next Generation Fellow of the American Assembly,[139] an American Marshall Memorial Fellow,[139] a Salzburg Seminar–Freeman Fellow on U.S.-East Asian Relations,[140] and a Yukos Fellow for U.S.–Russian Relations.[140]
Abrams received the Stevens Award for Outstanding Legal Contributions and the Elmer Staats Award for Public Service, both national honors presented by the Harry S. Truman Foundation.[141][142] She was also a 1994 Harry S. Truman Scholar.[143]
In 2001, Ebony magazine named Abrams one of "30 Leaders of the Future".[144] In 2004 she was named to Georgia Trend's "40 Under 40" list,[145] and the Atlanta Business Chronicle named Abrams to its "Top 50 Under 40" list. In 2006 she was named a Georgia Rising Star by Atlanta Magazine and by Law & Politics Magazine.[146]
Abrams received a single vote, from Kathleen Rice, in the 2019 election for Speaker of the U.S. House.[147]
In 2019, Abrams received the Distinguished Public Service Award from the University of Texas LBJ School of Public Affairs, where she obtained her Master's of Public Affairs in 1998. The award is the highest honor bestowed upon alumni of the school, with recipients selected by their fellow alumni. The award reflects her "remarkable leadership on behalf of her constituents as well as citizens all over this country", according to Dean Angela Evans.[148]
For her nonviolent campaign to get out the vote, Abrams has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.[149] In 2021, she was included in the Time 100, Time's annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.[150]
Abrams was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Character Voice-Over Performance in 2021 for her work on an election-themed special episode of Black-ish.[151] She lost at the 73rd Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards to Maya Rudolph of Big Mouth.[152]
Other work
Abrams with Terri Sewell and Doug Jones at the 55th Anniversary Bridge Crossing Jubilee in Selma, Alabama in 2020
Abrams has served on the boards of directors for Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, the Center for American Progress,[153] Atlanta Metropolitan State College Foundation, Gateway Center for the Homeless, and the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education; and on the advisory boards for Literacy Action and Health Students Taking Action Together (HSTAT). She also serves on the Board of Visitors for Agnes Scott College and the University of Georgia,[154] as well as on the board of advisors for Let America Vote (a voting rights organization founded by former Missouri secretary of state Jason Kander).[155]
Abrams has completed seven international fellowships and traveled to "more than a dozen foreign countries" for policy work.[156][157] She is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations[158] and spoke at CFR's Conference on Diversity in International Affairs in 2019.[159] She has also spoken at London's Chatham House,[160] the National Security Action Forum,[161] and a conference hosted by the Yale Kerry Initiative and Jackson Institute for Global Affairs.[162][163] In 2019, Abrams contributed an essay to Foreign Affairs magazine on how identity politics strengthens liberal democracy.[164][165]
Abrams was featured in All In: The Fight For Democracy, a documentary by Lisa Cortés and Liz Garbus about voter suppression in the United States. In it, she talks about her family's voting struggles in Mississippi and voter suppression during her 2018 Georgia gubernatorial campaign.[166]
Abrams appeared as an actor in "Coming Home", the season 4 finale of Star Trek: Discovery, as the President of United Earth.[167]
On April 5, 2023 Howard University announced the appointment of Abrams to the inaugural Ronald W. Walters Endowed Chair for Race and Black Politics. The chair is housed in the Ronald W. Walters Leadership and Public Policy Center at Howard University.[168]
Personal life
Abrams is the second of six children born to Reverend Carolyn and Reverend Robert Abrams, originally of Mississippi.[13] Her siblings include Andrea Abrams, U.S. district judge Leslie Abrams Gardner, Richard Abrams, Walter Abrams, and Jeanine Abrams McLean.[169][170]
In April 2018, Abrams wrote an op-ed for Fortune revealing that she owed $54,000 in federal back taxes and held $174,000 in credit card and student loan debt.[171] She was repaying the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) incrementally on a payment plan after deferring her 2015 and 2016 taxes, which she stated was necessary to help with her family's medical bills. During the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election, she donated $50,000 to her own campaign.[172][173] In 2019, she completed payment of her back taxes to the IRS in addition to other outstanding credit card and student loan debt reported during the gubernatorial campaign.[174]
Electoral history
Democratic primary results, 2018[175]
Party Candidate Votes %
Democratic Stacey Abrams 424,305 76.44
Democratic Stacey Evans 130,784 23.56
Total votes 555,089 100.0
2018 Georgia gubernatorial election
Party Candidate Votes %
Republican Brian Kemp 1,978,408 50.2%
Democratic Stacey Abrams 1,923,685 48.8%
Libertarian Ted Metz 37,235 1.0%
Democratic primary results, 2022
Party Candidate Votes %
Democratic Stacey Abrams 726,113 100%
2022 Georgia gubernatorial election
Party Candidate Votes %
Republican Brian Kemp 2,111,572 53.4%
Democratic Stacey Abrams 1,813,673 45.9%
Libertarian Shane Hazel 28,163 0.7%
Books
Abrams, Stacey (April 24, 2018). Minority Leader: How to Build Your Future and Make Real Change. New York: Henry Holt and Co. ISBN 978-1250191298. OCLC 1003252451.
Abrams, Stacey (June 9, 2020). Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America. New York: Henry Holt and Co. ISBN 978-1250257703. OCLC 1145087492.
Abrams, Stacey (May 11, 2021). While Justice Sleeps: A Novel. New York: Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-54657-7. OCLC 1248723801.
Abrams, Stacey (December 28, 2021). Stacey's Extraordinary Words. New York: Balzer + Bray. ISBN 978-0-063-20947-3. OCLC 1285933000.
Abrams, Stacey (May 23, 2023). Rogue Justice: A Thriller. New York: Doubleday. ISBN 978-0385548328. OCLC 1346615705.
Romance novels (as Selena Montgomery):[176]
Montgomery, Selena (April 24, 2001). Rules of Engagement. Arabesque Books/BET Publications. ISBN 978-1583142240. OCLC 47236242.
Montgomery, Selena (December 25, 2001). The Art of Desire. Arabesque Books/BET Publications. ISBN 978-1583142646. OCLC 48714733.
Montgomery, Selena (October 25, 2002). Power of Persuasion. Washington D.C.: Arabesque Books/BET Publications. ISBN 978-1583142653. OCLC 1035558096.
Montgomery, Selena (June 14, 2004). Never Tell. New York: St. Martin's Paperbacks. ISBN 978-0312993061. OCLC 1246146151.
Montgomery, Selena (April 25, 2006). Hidden Sins. New York: HarperTorch. ISBN 978-0060798499. OCLC 67712090.
Montgomery, Selena (December 26, 2006). Secrets and Lies. New York: Avon. ISBN 978-0060798512. OCLC 77546746.
Montgomery, Selena (June 24, 2008). Reckless. New York: Avon. ISBN 978-0061376030. OCLC 156816662.
Montgomery, Selena (March 31, 2009). Deception. New York: Avon. ISBN 978-0061376054. OCLC 232977965.
Stacey Abrams follows her thriller 'While Justice Sleeps' with 'Rogue Justice'
May 23, 20235:04 AM ET
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NPR's Michel Martin speaks with former Georgia state legislator Stacey Abrams about her latest novel: Rogue Justice. She has a third Avery Keene novel in the works.
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MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Former Georgia state representative Stacey Abrams has one of those resumes that makes you feel bad about yourself - world-class education, a distinguished career in the Georgia legislature, a national leader on voting rights, entrepreneur, professor, and she's a prolific author of both fiction and political strategy. Her most recent book, her 15th, is another novel, and it's out today. It's her second thriller that features Supreme Court clerk, amateur sleuth and all-around savior of democracy, Avery Keene. And Stacey Abrams is with us now to tell us more about it. Welcome. Thank you for joining us.
STACEY ABRAMS: Thank you for having me. It's always a delight.
MARTIN: I think people may remember your first thriller, which features Avery Keene. It's a - you know, a rogue president involved in international intrigue, a Supreme Court justice who falls into a persistent vegetative state. It's my recollection that the first draft of this book - everybody passed on it because the president seemed too absurd, and nobody cares about the Supreme Court. I take it it was different this time around.
ABRAMS: Yes. So I wrote it, actually, in 2010. So there was turmoil but nothing quite as egregious as I portrayed in "While Justice Sleeps." And so "Rogue Justice" picks up four months later and really looks at the consequences of confronting a president who's made some egregious mistakes but where the public is divided about what that means. We follow her through the political fallout. But she is contacted by someone who recognizes that one part of our court system is imperiled. And so Avery has to figure out how broken our systems are by understanding just how fragile our infrastructure is in this nation.
MARTIN: One of the reasons I was curious about this is that your last book dealt with things that we subsequently had to worry about, like Big Pharma, bioengineering. This one deals with surveillance and things of that - how do you think of these things? The reason I ask is that, you know, some people who write about, like, science fiction - right? - what they'll do is they'll extrapolate forward. They'll think, well, what would it be like if we had no water or something like that? So, like, how do you come up with these things?
ABRAMS: I really like to understand where we are and where we go next. And, as much as I love science fiction, I'm trying to think 10, 20, 30 years in the future, not a thousand, 2,000, 3,000 years in the future. But the conversations about our infrastructure matter to me. I actually, at one point, had an infrastructure consulting firm, and so I'd spent some time thinking about the physical infrastructure of the country. My younger sister is a federal judge, and we were having lunch after she'd come back from a conference. And I was actually flipping through her conference program, and that gave me part of the idea for this book. But really, my ideas come from thinking about what we see in the world around us and then what could go slightly wrong or, more importantly, what questions aren't we asking about what's happening to us?
MARTIN: So could you give us a head's up? What's keeping you up at night now, just so, you know, we can get ready?
ABRAMS: I will say, I begin a conversation about cybersecurity in this book, and it continues to be an issue that I want to explore a bit more. I think about AI, and, yes, we have this sort of existential crisis conversation about AI, but I think there are more pedestrian issues for us to concern ourselves with. Assuming you can't stop it, let's think about what else could be done with it beyond - not just the future of it taking our jobs, but what does it mean for the nature of what work is?
MARTIN: You know, to that end, the subjects you deal with in these books are serious, but there is kind of a fun tone to it. They're not so dire that you can't kind of enjoy it as a ride. And I was just wondering how you arrive at that kind of tone.
ABRAMS: It's how I exist. My work is hard. The conversations we have to have, from Avery's grappling with her mother's - her addiction to drugs and her mental illness and what that means - there are dark and hard things we face. And my life, the way I was raised, the way I think about the world, it's not just how do we grapple in the dark, and how do we push through the dark? It's how do we bring the light?
MARTIN: Your Washington-based books are animated by a concern about the fragility of and I might even say corruption of our democratic systems. So I do have to ask you about what you make of the recent reporting by ProPublica and other outlets regarding the financial ties between Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and this Republican megadonor Harlan Crow.
ABRAMS: We should all be held to the highest ethical standard, particularly those who have been both privileged with and burdened with the responsibility for guarding our legal system. And irrespective of who it is, what we should all be demanding as Americans is the highest responsibility. My hope is that what is being revealed in these conversations also exposes a weakness in our structure. And when there are concerns about the ethics of those who we have to trust to mete out justice, then it is the obligation of those in power to satisfy those concerns.
MARTIN: And to that end, though, the whole question of the fitness for office of people in these high positions - there are Democrats who do have concern about President Biden, who are worried about whether he is up to the job or, at least, if he's up to another four years. And I want to know if you share those concerns.
ABRAMS: I believe in the leadership of President Biden, and I look forward to four more years.
MARTIN: OK. So what's next for you? You've just accepted an endowed chair at Howard University. Congratulations on that. What's next for you?
ABRAMS: I have a third Avery Keene novel in the offing that I need to get to sometime this summer. But I am actually focused on both my entrepreneurial ventures. I have done a lot of work with small businesses. I am working with Rewiring America, making certain that consumers have access to the resources that are coming through the Inflation Reduction Act for electrifying our homes and helping address climate action. And I'm excited about the work I'm going to be doing at Howard University.
MARTIN: Are you having any fun?
ABRAMS: I am. I'm having a great time. I get to wake up every morning and do things I believe in and things I love. And I am pleased by my ability to navigate all of the facets of who I am. And I think it can be a bit disconcerting to some, but I'm never defined by one moment or one idea because we have a lot of work to do, and I'm grateful to have a chance to try to tackle it from a number of different perspectives.
MARTIN: Or maybe just making the rest of us feel inadequate.
ABRAMS: I'm trying to entertain.
(LAUGHTER)
MARTIN: Stacey Abrams' latest book - it's a novel - is "Rogue Justice," and it is out today. Stacey Abrams, thanks so much for talking with us.
ABRAMS: Michel, thank you so much. It's been a delight.
(SOUNDBITE OF WAX STAG'S "NIGHT TREK (BIBIO REMIX)")
QUOTED: "(The book is) an homage to both of my parents: My mom, who made sure we understood the magic of a library. And my dad, who fought to be able to read and at the age of 30 basically taught himself to read prolifically because it was so important to him. That's what I want kids and their parents to take from this book—that there is a universe out there, and we just have to go and find it."
Stacey Abrams' new children's book is an ode to her childhood
Abrams sees books as a way to show kids "there's a universe out there."
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Dec. 14, 2022, 10:46 AM EST
By Randi Richardson
For Stacey Abrams, life began with a book. Speaking to TODAY.com, the politician and published author says that books were her favorite companions growing up in Mississippi.
"It was a way to find friends and to be everything I thought I could be because in those pages, I could find a world I wanted to be in," Abrams tells TODAY.com.
"I was very reserved ... I skipped a grade and kids get to know each other early in school. I was a bit of a new kid in the space, but I also just felt much more comfortable with books and words."
Finding solace in books and community among book lovers is the theme of her new children's book "Stacey's Remarkable Books," available Dec. 13.
Throughout the 18 pages, the title character reads during recess instead of playing with the other students. But one by one, the other students join her in reading and they start a book club where they each pick books in their home languages and teach each other words.
The cover of Stacey Abrams' new children's book.
The cover of Stacey Abrams' new children's book.Kitt Thomas / HarperCollins Children’s Books
The new release is a followup to her 2021 children's book "Stacey’s Extraordinary Words," in which young Stacey competes in a spelling bee. Abrams is also the author of romance novels and political thrillers, including the recent "While Justice Sleeps."
Abrams, a former state representative in Georgia, dedicated the book to her six nieces and nephews and says the book is based off her personal experience of growing up in Gulfport, Miss.
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She says language is “grounded in not only where we’re from, but who can understand it," which creates a power dynamic. Reading, for Abrams, is a tool for creating empathy and understanding.
“The energy of books, the energy of storytelling, is the ability to shape how people understand each other, how we understand the world around us and how we understand our place in it,” she says.
Abrams, 48, learned this first hand from her mother and father, from whom her love of reading comes. Her mother was a librarian; she and her siblings "used to take naps in the stacks" of the library she worked in. Her father learned to read as an adult because he grew up in segregated Mississippi and fell through the cracks of the education system.
"(The book is) an homage to both of my parents: My mom, who made sure we understood the magic of a library. And my dad, who fought to be able to read and at the age of 30 basically taught himself to read prolifically because it was so important to him. That's what I want kids and their parents to take from this book — that there is a universe out there, and we just have to go and find it."
"There is a universe out there, and we just have to go and find it."
Stacey Abrams
Abrams, a graduate of Yale Law School, says she is always reading three books at a time — one fiction, a non-fiction choice and a third book that she's just interested in. She's currently reading "The Anomaly: A Novel" by Hervé Le Tellier, "The Last Lion: Volume 1: Winston Churchill: Visions of Glory, 1874 — 1932" by William Manchester and "Freeing Energy" by Bill Nussey.
She says she reads so much because it's exciting for her. But she realizes many kids and adults consider reading more chore than pastime.
"I've never found books to be boring," Abrams explains. "They've always been the windows into worlds. But they're also a great place to go and bring things back with you. The best books are the ones that you carry with you, where you carry a new word, or a new way of thinking, or a new way of imagining who you are and who you can be. That, to me, is the most impressive quality of books, especially storybooks for kids."
Stacey Abrams
Stacey Abrams says reads three books at a time.Kitt Thomas / HarperCollins Children’s Books
Abrams says kids often have little control over what their parents have decided for them, such as where to live, what school to attend, what grocery stores or churches they visit and even what they eat. The choice of what book to read next becomes that much more important, Abrams says.
"You live in a very small space because you're a kid and books expand those spaces and expand your understanding of where you fit," she says. "You then realize, 'There's something beyond what I know. There's some space beyond what I occupy. My bedroom is not the center of the world and this school is not the only place.' And that is such a vital and visual opportunity for kids."
Of course, reading takes time and Abrams knows there is only so much time in a day. But she says "we make space in our days for the things that are vital to us." For her, that's reading.
"We don’t ask how did you make time to (eat). This is not to disparage anyone who doesn’t read, but reading is so much a part of who I am, I’m going to find the time to do it. And it may not be reading a whole book that day but I’m going to read something and it’s going to add to my day."
Abrams' reading routine entails waking up early to read and then returning to her book again in the evening. "That means there’s something I’m not going to do tonight that maybe I would have done because I want to finish this book," she says.
"Stacey's Remarkable Books" explains how reading can be just as fun as playing outside, if not more fun depending on the book.
"Stacey's Remarkable Books" explains how reading can be just as fun as playing outside, if not more fun depending on the book.Kitt Thomas / HarperCollins Children’s Books
Abrams' book celebrating diversity comes amid ongoing legal fights to ban diverse books in schools. She cites those legal battles as another reason for why she wrote the children's book.
"There's been this national conversation and somewhat controversy about diversity and whether we should talk about it," she says. "And the reality is, absolutely. Children can see. They know things are different. They know their lives are not the same as everyone else's. And it is disingenuous, and I think dangerous, to not engage that. And so I was thinking, what experience did I have as a child that made me think about the world that way?"
Abrams focusing on her book right now has given her space to reflect on what's next for her. Previously, she ran for Governor of Georgia and lost to incumbent Republican Brian Kemp for a second time.
"I don't know what I will run for again, or if I'll run again," she says. "My career has been grounded in yes, I run for office, but I also do my best to help others run and help others win. And so whether it's me or someone else, I'm not done with politics. I don't know what's next yet. But I'm going to figure it out."
QUOTED: "My writing is based on who I am and who I want to be. Whether I’m writing about an artist or about a lost kingdom, [or] about ethnobotany or chemical physics, I want not only the reader to see and learn, but [also] the reader to see and accept that we contain multitudes. Literature’s purpose is to do that."
Stacey Abrams on Her Reissued Novel ‘The Art of Desire’: It Pushes Readers to “Be Curious”
The author talks to Shondaland about the second novel in her trilogy series, finding her voice as a writer, and refusing to limit herself.
By Kayla GrantPublished: Sep 5, 2023
Every item on this page was chosen by a Shondaland editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy.
Stacey Abrams is a living example that anything is possible. The multifaceted changemaker continuously opens doors for her community through not only her activism and political ties but also the power of her pen. Writing at times under the nom de plume Selena Montgomery, the serial author inspires her readers to live limitlessly.
Abrams’ love for writing stems from being surrounded by books as a young girl. Her mother was a librarian, which helped foster Abrams’ desire to read and tell her own stories. “I tried my first hand [at writing] a novel when I was 12,” she recalls during a recent interview with Shondaland. “[That first book] The Diary of Angst did not go anywhere. Then, in law school, I decided this would be my last chance to take a stab at writing a novel.”
Her “last” attempt at writing a novel blossomed into a romance espionage spy series that includes the books Rules of Engagement, The Art of Desire, and Power of Persuasion. The International Security Agency trilogy placed Black characters at the forefront at a time when it was very rare in literature. More than 20 years after their initial release, the novels are hitting the shelves again, with the second novel set to be reissued on September 5.
Shondaland spoke with Abrams about The Art of Desire, the current renaissance for Black literature, and her advice for people who want to do it all.
KAYLA GRANT: I’d love to start out with you describing this story — which I am so excited to dive into — in your own words.
STACEY ABRAMS: While we met Alex Walton in the first book [of the International Security Agency trilogy], she was so exciting to me and so much fun, she had to have her own novel. The Art of Desire is the story of Alex, who is trying to figure out who she is and how she’s going to navigate the world. She has divergent interests, needs to pick something and doesn’t want to. She meets Phillip Turman, who is the best man [at a wedding], and they become embroiled in action, adventure, and romance.
KG: Speaking of romance, there had to be something that made you fall for the idea of love. What was that for you?
SA: I grew up reading very broadly but was absolutely committed to romance novels and to all of the ABC soap operas. First of all, I learned really good words in romance. Romance writers [not only] were always using fun language to describe things but also got to explore all of these different worlds and opportunities.
I realized when I wrote my first novel, and when I wrote The Art of Desire, [that] I could tell complex, interesting stories. I could have smart, capable women who looked like me. I could do it all through a genre that encourages us to just be anything.
At the time, there were so few Black women writers, and if they did write, it was expected to be the same story and to be very limited in its scope. Romance gave me a chance to tell these broad, sweeping stories that didn’t [have] limit[s]. I could be culturally agnostic and still have Black characters who got to have full, complete, and complex lives, and got to fall in love.
new york, new york may 25 politician and activist stacey abrams speaks during a conversation with wilson cruz at the 92nd street y on may 25, 2023 in new york city photo by john lamparskigetty images
John Lamparski//Getty Images
Politician and activist Stacey Abrams speaks during a conversation with Wilson Cruz at The 92nd Street Y on May 25, 2023 in New York City.
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KG: We are in the midst of a renaissance in Black literature; why do you think it’s important for Black people to have diversity in the stories that they read?
SA: Because we are whole, complete, and complex people whose humanity shouldn’t be relegated to one specific notion and one set of limiting factors. My writing is based on who I am and who I want to be. Whether I’m writing about an artist or about a lost kingdom, [or] about ethnobotany or chemical physics, I want not only the reader to see and learn, but [also] the reader to see and accept that we contain multitudes. Literature’s purpose is to do that.
Romance is the most widely read genre, I believe, which means you have the opportunity to tell these stories to millions of people who did not know they wanted to hear them. [Romance] is a genre of writing that is too often denigrated, but I think the Bridgerton stories explained again that you can tell complex stories about who people are, how they think, what they want, what they need, [and] what they desire. You can do it all knowing that you’re going to get a happy ending, but the journey makes the story worth telling.
KG: Speaking of complex stories, the male love interest Phillip Turman has an interesting backstory. How did you craft his backstory, and what made him perfect for Alex Walton?
SA: Phillip was supposed to die in the first book. The entire premise was that Phillip’s death was the catalyst for the story, but the more I wrote about him and the more I created him, he had to be his own person. He had to survive.
What I love about him, and the facet of him that comes from me, [is while] he’s a spy, he’s [also] interested in politics. He cares about a global notion of who we are. He has a strong sense of commitment and obligation and a deeply held sense of loyalty. That, to me, was so important about him. He would sacrifice himself for causes [and] for people he believes in. Matching him with Alex was really about this man [who] has this strong sense of self and loyalty, [and] this broad swath of adventure, [so] who would be his equal?
Alex has always been theoretical. She was a writer. She was an artist. She was always exploring the concept, but this was a chance to have it happen to her in real life. That’s why I thought the combination was so interesting because she was just a throwaway character. I wanted her to have a moment with Riley, and then I had so much fun writing her, I was like, “She gets to have her own book, and Phillip is the perfect guy for her.”
los angeles, california april 23 stacey abrams attends the 2023 los angeles times festival of books at the university of southern california on april 23, 2023 in los angeles, california photo by david livingstongetty images
David Livingston//Getty Images
Stacey Abrams attends the 2023 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at the University of Southern California on April 23, 2023 in Los Angeles.
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KG: With every story, the person who wields the pen is breathing life into these characters. Did you learn anything about yourself from the characters during the writing process?
SA: Absolutely. I was starting my second year as a lawyer, and I’m practicing tax law in the day and writing romance novels at night. I was [also] volunteering for the person who had become the first Black woman to be mayor of a major city in the U.S.
For me, it was a catharsis trying to navigate all of these pieces of myself when people were telling me you’ve got to pick one. You’ve got to be one. You can’t do all of these different things. Stacey, you can’t write romance and tax policy. You can’t be in politics and be a good corporate attorney. Writing Alex’s story was, for me, the navigation of how you contain all of these different facets of yourself. Phillip’s story about wanting to grapple with the challenges, the beliefs, [and] the very strong principles that you have — how do you inject them into the newest life that you need to lead? It was really helpful.
The Art of Desire
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KG: Similar to the way that you have lived your life, I believe that Generation Z is always trying to do everything at once. What is your advice for young, aspiring “do everything” people?
SA: I have this mantra I use, which is “Be curious. Solve problems. Do good.” I start with curiosity because we do not have to be defined by one facet of who we are, by one moment of what we do, [and] by the one success that we’ve had. Curiosity means you explore and you challenge. Sometimes that means challenging yourself, but more often, it means challenging someone else’s expectations of you.
Often, we are limiting ourselves because we think that the answer has been found, but not by us. My mission is always to think about what do I think is wrong, and what role can I play in trying to solve it. I’m not going to solve everything. I’m probably not going to have the right answer to anything, but I can try.
Then, lastly, do good. When we get stuck, [and] when we become despondent or overwhelmed, there is nothing that can shake you from that more effectively and completely than doing good for someone else. Fundamentally, that’s what happens with both Alex and Phillip in their different ways. When they decide to do good, they find love, they find themselves, and they find a future.
KG: What’s your main message for readers as they read and digest this book?
SA: I want them to believe that they get to be curious. What is so important to me is that Alex’s curiosity both creates the problems but also helps solve them. I want them to just enjoy the journey of finding them, finding each other, and finding who they are in their togetherness.
Then, I want them to learn. It was a lot of fun doing research about the pieces that undergird the story. You can write stories that are fun and light [but] are also complex and have depth to them. I want them to leave feeling like they learned something about themselves [and] that they’ve met a couple they [would] want to meet one day.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Rogue Justice. By Stacey Abrams. May 2023. 368p. Doubleday, $29 (9780385548328); e-book (9780385548335).
Plucky, indefatigable Supreme Court clerk Avery Keene, first met in While Justice Sleeps (2021), is back, and none too soon, as a disaster beyond our wildest imagination is about to be unleashed. Despite Avery's exposure of his corruption, President Brandon Stokes is back in power and intent on shredding her reputation. While laying low at a judicial conference, Avery is handed a mysterious file and burner phone by a troubled FISA Court clerk who has a tragically short lifespan. Soon Avery is feverishly decoding a conspiracy involving judges on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and finds herself battling Stokes, the FBI, and the NSA to uncover a deadly plot to wreak revenge at the highest levels of U.S. government. Once again, Avery relies on her backup band of steely-eyed FBI agent Robert Lee, hunky cybersecurity expert Jared Wynn, and loyal roommate Ling Yin as she dodges international assassins, crypto-currency hackers, and politicians with a forest full of axes to grind. The string of high-powered agencies and technobabble grow baffling, yet Abrams' appealing characters ground this frenetic thriller in wry humor and heart.--Lesley Williams
HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Fans are waiting for the second Avery Keene thriller from the multitalented, high-profile Abrams.
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Williams, Lesley. "Rogue Justice." Booklist, vol. 119, no. 15, 1 Apr. 2023, pp. 30+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A745656557/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7c0b0376. Accessed 23 Jan. 2025.
Abrams, Stacey ROGUE JUSTICE Doubleday (Fiction None) $29.00 5, 23 ISBN: 9780385548328
In a sequel to While Justice Sleeps (2021), Abrams gives Supreme Court law clerk-turned- reluctant sleuth Avery Keene another deadly conspiracy to unravel.
Last time out, Keene, a Black woman in her late 20s who worked for loose cannon Justice Howard Wynn, who's White, used damaging information he had gathered before falling into a coma to help force the semi-Trump-ish President Brandon Stokes (a reviled authoritarian wannabe but one with a deep intellect) at least temporarily out of office, as his Cabinet used the 25th Amendment to sideline him. Now, on the eve of Stokes' impeachment trial, Keene stumbles on what turns out to be a revenge plot to crash the nation's power grid. Before being shot to death for his efforts, a young law clerk desperately passes her privileged information about factors leading to the suicide of his boss, a federal judge in Idaho. The judge's death has great significance because she was one of the members of the powerful United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose duties include monitoring national security. Several of its 11 judges had connections to energy companies and exhibited "nonconforming judicial behaviors." A persona non grata in Washington "who'd roiled a presidency," Keene finds the going tough, not to mention dangerous. The plot features murderous government officials and an ex-Mossad assassin known as Nyx. While carefully and sometimes cleverly plotted, the novel never really gains momentum. Abrams fails to make the grid conspiracy very threatening, and the story is slowed by awkward writing: "Rage. Grief. Betrayal. Vengeance. Any of these had been known to drive good people to extremes, yet the combination of this tragic quartet manifested in a plot that boggled the mind." And how jaded have we become that an impeachment is mere background noise?
A competent but only moderately suspenseful thriller.
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"Abrams, Stacey: ROGUE JUSTICE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2023. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A748974269/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8b825f92. Accessed 23 Jan. 2025.
QUOTED: "a blueprint for effective social action: simple, savvy, and tried and often true."
Abrams, Stacey STACEY SPEAKS UP Harper/HarperCollins (Children's None) $19.99 9, 24 ISBN: 9780063271876
Voting rights activist and former gubernatorial candidate Abrams' latest picture book sees her younger self taking a stand against injustice.
The delight of "TacoPizza Fryday"--a special lunch that the whole school voted on--turns sour for elementary schooler Stacey when she notices that some students are excluded because they can't pay. Sympathetic school librarian Mr. McCormick explains that the "complicated" rules about who qualifies for free lunches leave some children out; he gently suggests that she and her friends address the school board rather than starting with a demonstration. Initially reluctant to speak in public, Stacey decides to lead a petition drive instead. She eventually nerves herself to stand up at the meeting to plead for a policy change, and when the board puts her off, she joins her friends in gently pressuring her principal every Friday with a list of kids who were left out that week. Thomas fills the illustrations with exaggeratedly wide eyes and open mouths; the crowds of diverse cheering, sign-waving students present rousing images of collective action and, at the end, collective triumph. "Imagine what else all their voices could change together," the author concludes pointedly, cogently adding in her closing note that sometimes "you feel like you're fighting only for yourself, until you look around and realize that others are simply waiting for someone to go first." Though the story is fictional, backmatter references real-life examples of Abrams learning to "speak up and take action."
A blueprint for effective social action: simple, savvy, and tried and often true. (child hunger resources)(Picture book. 7-9)
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"Abrams, Stacey: STACEY SPEAKS UP." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A802865077/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e1367afd. Accessed 23 Jan. 2025.
Abrams, Stacey POWER OF PERSUASION Berkley (Fiction None) $29.00 1, 21 ISBN: 9780593439456
A tech executive finds herself involved in high-stakes geopolitical espionage--and involved with a newly crowned king--in this rereleased novel by Abrams writing as Montgomery.
Sparks fly when A.J. Grayson meets Damon Toca at her cousin Adam's wedding; she wonders if she'll ever see the cryptic art gallerist again, and holds onto the suit jacket he left behind at the reception. When Damon ascends to the throne of Jafir, a fictional island nation that's proving pivotal in negotiations for a peace deal between the African-Arab Alliance and Israel, A.J. wonders how much of the intense flirtation they shared was real. When she finds out that Adam and his bride, Raleigh, are spies working with an extra-governmental group called the International Security Agency, her sense of betrayal skyrockets. Now, the ISA needs help from A.J., who's the creator of an artificial intelligence algorithm that only she knows how to use. The upcoming peace talks would make the perfect target for terrorists wanting to maintain instability in the Middle East, and A.J.'s technology could be the key to preparing for a variety of disastrous scenarios. All they need is for A.J. to travel to Jafir and act as a consultant for six weeks, which would reunite her with Damon and put her in several types of danger. This novel was originally published in 2002 and it feels outdated in several ways, AI aside. "Fiery heroine meets domineering hero" was very much the trend in early 2000s romances, but watching Damon dole out barbed insults toward A.J., invade her personal space, and apologize with physical affection doesn't play well anymore. Needless to say, the situation in the Middle East has also changed dramatically since the novel was written. Formerly out of print, this romantic thriller might have the ability to reach a new audience for Montgomery, but there's a reason many romance fans look fondly at their books from this era but opt not to revisit them.
A major overhaul would be needed for this rerelease to appeal to modern romance readers.
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"Abrams, Stacey: POWER OF PERSUASION." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A817945903/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3ae78383. Accessed 23 Jan. 2025.
QUOTED: "a worthy message delivered with a generous dose of inclusivity."
Abrams, Stacey STACEY'S REMARKABLE BOOKS Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (Children's None) $19.99 12, 13 ISBN: 978-0-06-327185-2
Sharing books brings children from multiple backgrounds together in this companion to Stacey's Extraordinary Words (2021).
Again lightly burnishing actual childhood memories, voting rights activist and former gubernatorial candidate Abrams recalls reaching out as a young book lover to Julie, a new Vietnamese classmate shy about reading in English. Choosing books to read and discuss together on weekly excursions to the school's library, the two are soon joined by enough other children from Gambia, South Korea, and elsewhere that their beaming librarian, Mr. McCormick, who is dark-skinned, sets up an after-school club. Later, Julie adds some give and take to their friendship by helping Stacey overcome her own reluctance to join the other children on the playground. Though views of the library seen through a faint golden haze flecked with stars go a little over the top (school librarians may disagree), Thomas fills the space with animated, bright-eyed young faces clustering intimately together over books and rendered in various shades beneath a range of hairstyles and head coverings. The author underscores the diversity of the cast by slipping scattered comments in Spanish, Wolof, and other languages into the dialogue and, after extolling throughout the power of books and stories to make new friends as well as open imaginations to new experiences and identities, brings all of her themes together in an afterword capped by an excellent list of recommended picture books. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A worthy message delivered with a generous dose of inclusivity. (Picture-book memoir. 6-9)
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"Abrams, Stacey: STACEY'S REMARKABLE BOOKS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2022. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A729072502/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9a588f12. Accessed 23 Jan. 2025.
Visit our dedicated hub for coverage of the 2022 midterm elections.
STACEY ABRAMS is running to be Georgia's governor against the Republican incumbent, Brian Kemp. The pair faced each other in 2018, too. If elected on November 8th, Ms Abrams would become America's first black female governor. Rather than write a guest commentary, she chose to speak to our editors from her office in Georgia. The script has been edited for length and clarity.
The Economist: Over the years, Republicans have captured an increasing share of working-class voters while Democrats have increasingly become the party of the college-educated. And I wondered if you thought that was a problem and if so, how might your agenda as governor help reverse that?
Stacey Abrams: I actually would frame it slightly differently because the working class is a much broader narrative than it's often given credit for being: it includes women, it includes people of colour, and those communities are actually migrating towards the Democratic Party. Typically, when we hear the working class, it's actually a demographically narrow set. And my responsibility is to first and foremost acknowledge those who are here and in need of our help but also to expand access and so the work that I've done both as a legislator and as a candidate has been about how do we increase access? How do we tackle the fundamentals so that everyone sees the Democratic Party as the party of the people?
That's why my campaign is grounded in using a record and historic $6.6bn surplus to actually fix the broken pieces of the state of Georgia. That's education, health care, housing, and the ability to make a good living, whether you work for yourself or someone else. To that end, every policy I'm proposing, every metric that I'm using, cuts across communities but especially lifts and invests in the working class, because they are the most likely to need access to public education. They are the most likely to face the challenges of unaffordable housing. They are the most likely to be affected by a broken health-care system, and they're the ones who want to be able to not just make a living but make a good living. And so my responsibility is to propose ideas and then to execute them, should I become governor, in ways that demonstrate to them that I am in this for that.
The Economist: Results from the 2020 election showed that the Republican Party has actually made gains with Hispanic voters and to a lesser degree with African-American voters. Some public polling even suggests that your margins among black voters in Georgia, particularly among black men, have slipped and that they potentially threaten your chance of victory. Do you think that is just a statistical mirage or a real trend, and if it's real, what do you plan to do about it?
Stacey Abrams: Let's start with the larger issue. We know that there are no monoliths in politics, but there have been loyalties that are important, and I take none of these loyalties for granted. Part of my intention has always been to meet communities where they are and to be very thoughtful about asking for their help and asking for their vote. Because to do otherwise is deeply disrespectful. That intentionality has actually been loaded into this mirage—and I think that language is appropriate. I am doing as well with black voters as I was in 2018. I am doing exactly the same as Senator Raphael Warnock, but what is often lost in the horse race number is that this is not a question of whether they intend to vote for me or the other guy. It is whether they intend to vote or not. And it is that level of disrespect and that level of disingenuity that often convinces black voters, especially black men, not to vote.
If we assume that they have to, if we presume that because they exist, I will get their votes, then that is both malpractice on my part and bad punditry on the parts of those who would take those numbers and spin out these narratives. My approach has been the same both in 2018 as it is in 2022. I hold conversations, I publicly engage. I understand that I have to earn those votes with the same assiduous attention that you would have to earn any other cohort's votes. And I do so in a very public way. Because I know that to build the coalitions we need to win elections in a deeply polarised state that you've got to talk to everyone and that is why I've had conversations with African-American men, with Latinos, with AAPI [Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders], the Muslim community, with the disabled, I go everywhere and I talk to everyone. And I think it's always critical that when we look at these numbers, we actually understand what the question was that they asked and what the information was that they got. And these questions largely reflect the failure to say, is this a question about whether you're going to vote for a Democrat or not? Or is it a question of whether you're going to vote or not? And if you look at the concomitant numbers of people who simply haven't decided to vote, you see what my mission is, which is to get those who are the most distrustful of our policies to show up because they don't trust the government writ large, regardless of who's in charge.
The Economist: Speaking of 2018, Republicans sometimes point to your decision not to concede in the gubernatorial race that year, because of your claims that then Secretary of State Brian Kemp, now governor, had successfully suppressed votes as equivalent to President Donald Trump's refusal to concede in 2020. Would you be able to explain the difference and will the passage of restrictive laws such as SB 202 change things this time around?
Stacey Abrams: In 2018 I, at the start of my speech, acknowledged the outcome of the election. And what has been the entire narrative of Donald Trump has been a dispute about the outcome. I've never disputed the outcome. But what I've always questioned is the access and we have to remember in politics, those are two very different things. And in a democracy, access is about who can vote. Outcome is about who can win. No politician is guaranteed an outcome, but every eligible citizen should be guaranteed access, and my refusal to concede was very specifically and carefully and I would say, exhaustively used to describe the access issues.
And recently there was a 288-page decision by a federal court that acknowledged that under Brian Kemp, he administered a racist voter system that discriminated disproportionately against black and brown voters [On September 30th a federal judge rejected a lawsuit alleging that Georgia's voting practices violated voters' rights. It was filed in 2018 by a voting-rights group founded by Ms Abrams.] And while he did not have the authority to actually remediate the last three claims, that authority under his own analysis existed under the Gingles Standard, but did not exist under the 2021 Brnovich decision [Brnovich v Democratic National Committee, a Supreme Court case that held that Arizona laws did not violate the Voting Rights Act], which further weakens section two of the Voting Rights Act. And this governor has used the erosion of the Voting Rights Act to expand his voter suppression, and he did so with SB 202 [a controversial state voting law passed by Georgia Republicans in 2021]. And we are seeing it happen on the ground right now. We have groups that are using the law, that he passed with the knowledge that this could happen, to challenge 64,000 voters. We are watching in real time as senior citizens and the disabled and especially AAPI communities that use absentee ballots are being denied access because of the complicated nature of the system. We've seen higher rejection rates. We know that families that needed to use dropboxes—1.9m—are being denied that access because Brian Kemp thought that it led to too many people who voted. I am not misquoting him. He said he was frustrated by the results. Well, by his own admission, there was no fraud. So the only results he could have been frustrated by was the fact that his party lost.
My deep concern is that his failure to commit treason once has obfuscated his very intentional and long-standing voter suppression. Some 50,000 people were denied voter registration under the last election—within weeks of the election—under his own hand after he'd been successfully sued in a federal court. And even the most pernicious and just the most mean spirited piece, the refusal to allow people to have water in the line. Brian Kemp was a voter suppressor. It has been one of his signature moves, and I'm deeply concerned that he will do so again. But to go back to the fundamental question, my fight will always be about guaranteeing access because that's what any patriot should do. That's what any citizen should want. I have absolutely no right to an outcome. I've got to work for that. And that's why I intend to talk to every community and reach into every hamlet in every neighbourhood to turn out as many voters as I can. But there is no equivalence between my fight for access and Trump's fight for a manufactured outcome.
The Economist: Governor Kemp is credited by some with standing up to President Trump and the lie of the stolen election. Why shouldn't fair and independent-minded voters in Georgia take that as a sign of integrity and courage?
Stacey Abrams: Because every governor in American history has done exactly the same. He simply didn't commit treason. We should not lionise someone for not being an arsonist. You're not supposed to burn the house down. You're not supposed to commit treason. The consequences for not giving into a blatant lie was that the lie didn't get told. That's what we're taught to do in third grade. You don't do the wrong thing. You don't get praised for simply doing your job. That's why you got hired. And what he's done is he's used this to hide the fact that for fair-minded and independent voters that he also pushed and used the big lie to justify a draconian voter suppression law. He used that same veil to hide the fact that he's made it less safe to live in the state of Georgia, that under his leadership, gun violence has gone up and access to freedom has gone down. And he pretends to be a Main-Street Republican when people are looking, but the policies that he espouses and the laws that he assigned, and the promises he's made to bring a Texas-style anti-abortion law to Georgia, to continue to weaken gun laws, to deny access to affordable housing to communities. Those are things he will continue to do and not committing treason should not obfuscate everything else he is.
The Economist: On abortion: are there any compromises possible on the right to abortion? Are there any limitations short of the old Roe v Wade standard that you would be comfortable accepting, such as the 14-week limit that they have in France?
Stacey Abrams: Abortion is a medical decision. It is not a political decision. And as long as we allow politicians to make these choices, and to set these arbitrary limits, what we are doing is denying women their fundamental right to control their bodies and to control their medical choices. My belief is that abortion care should be available up into the point of viability as determined by a physician. And that viability if it threatens the life and health of the mother, that the priority has to be the mother. That is the responsibility, that is the obligation, and there should be no interference by politicians and government in what are medical decisions.
The Economist: In your opening remarks, you mentioned the surplus. Voters say they are most concerned with inflation and the cost of living, and Republicans enjoy a substantial lead on the economy and have done for most of the past decade. Is your agenda—to spend on teacher employee salaries, Medicaid expansion and the introduction of the state level earned income tax credit—premised on budget surpluses being large and interest rates being low? How can you convince voters in Georgia that you would be the best steward of the economy?
Stacey Abrams: Georgia has a record surplus and that record surplus can be invested over the next four years, not even the whole surplus, but we can use a portion of the surplus to actually amortise almost every one of the programmes that I've described without affecting future revenues or requiring additional revenues. And this has been validated by economists at MIT, who looked at my programme and said that indeed, I'm correct. What has happened in Georgia is that we've been lulled into this poverty of imagination but also false maths. In the state of Georgia, by expanding Medicaid, by increasing salaries, we not only can solve immediate issues, we actually can generate the revenue necessary to sustain and expand access and opportunity. And fundamentally it's the best economic development we can do. If the goal is to generate sufficient revenue to meet need, then right-sizing our budget using that surplus as a-once-in-a-lifetime, once-in-a-generation infusion of capital is the moral equivalent of essentially fixing the roof and fixing the plumbing so that the house is in good standing for another 100 years. And that's my plan and it's been proven to work.
The Economist: And you have proposed raising the base pay for Georgia State Troopers and prison guards to $50,000 per year. Do you think, unlike some Democrats proposed in 2020, that funding the police adequately is essential?
Stacey Abrams: I believe in every person making a living wage and in the state of Georgia $50,000 is a living wage.
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"A conversation with Stacey Abrams." The Economist, 13 Oct. 2022. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A753612933/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f2d00826. Accessed 23 Jan. 2025.
Montgomery, Selena RULES OF ENGAGEMENT Berkley (Fiction None) $27.00 9, 6 ISBN: 978-0-593-43939-5
Two spies are forced to work together despite their mutual mistrust in the latest pseudonymous novel from Stacey Abrams.
Dr. Raleigh Foster is a brilliant chemist who was recruited to work as an operative for the International Security Agency when she was only 20. The mysterious agency is a joint effort of more than 75 countries, undertaking top-secret missions to ensure peace and security around the globe. Adam Grayson and his best friend, Phillip Turman, were recruited to work for the ISA after graduating from Harvard Law School. The three worked together on a mission that went disastrously wrong three years earlier. Phillip died in action, and Adam blamed Raleigh for his death. Adam quit working with the ISA and returned to running his wealthy family's network of companies, while Raleigh continued to work as a highly decorated agent. Now, Raleigh is given the job of recruiting Adam to go undercover and stop a terrorist organization from converting one of his company's inventions into a chemical weapon. On the mission, Adam and Raleigh must pose as lovers, which makes it hard for them to ignore the sizzling attraction between them. As they spend more time undercover, they find a series of puzzling clues indicating that there's a mole inside the ISA. Adam is convinced that Raleigh's friend and mentor is the mole, while she suspects that Phillip might have faked his own death. The beginning of the novel is overburdened with exposition, but once Raleigh and Adam go undercover on the fictional Mediterranean island of Jafir, the plot picks up speed. The novel deftly explores loyalty and the perils of trusting in "the rules of engagement" in a world of intrigue and secrets.
A slow-burn romantic suspense story eventually finds its footing.
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"Montgomery, Selena: RULES OF ENGAGEMENT." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Oct. 2022. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A719982917/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1d6823b9. Accessed 23 Jan. 2025.
Rules of Engagement. By Selena Montgomery. Sept. 2022.336p. Berkley, $27 (9780593439395); e-book, $14.99 (9780593439418).
Georgia gubernatorial candidate and voting rights leader Stacey Abrams wrote this second-chance romantic suspense novel as Selena Montgomery. Adam Grayson and Raleigh Foster are both brilliant thinkers recruited from graduate school by a shadowy extragovernmental intelligence agency. Their last assignment together brought them to the (fictitious) Mediterranean island of Jafir, which has an African and Middle Eastern culture and a powerful terrorist organization called Scimitar. Raleigh and Adam were tasked with infiltrating it, but their conflicting temperaments drove them apart. Rules are sacrosanct to her, whereas he is a maverick. Now, three years later, they are back in Jafir to save Adam's project, Praxis, from falling into Scimitars hands to be used in chemical weapons. He blames her for the death of his best friend. She feels guilty about having to betray him again. He doesn't dare to risk his heart again. She doesn't believe she's capable of love. Trust is the fulcrum on which their professional and romantic relationships pivot and stumble. Abrams masterfully pairs the cracking pace of a thriller with the tenderness of a romance.--Keira Soleore
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Soleore, Keira. "Rules of Engagement." Booklist, vol. 118, no. 22, 1 Aug. 2022, p. 35. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A714679461/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=eb9f9afb. Accessed 23 Jan. 2025.
Abrams, Stacey LEVEL UP Portfolio (NonFiction None) $26.00 2, 22 ISBN: 978-0-593-53982-8
A fresh take on entrepreneurial endeavors and a love letter to small businesses everywhere.
Entrepreneurship is not for everyone. But at a time when increasing numbers of workers are reconsidering where they fit in light of the "Great Resignation," straight talk and advice from anyone who has "been there" is a welcome addition. Using the story of the three businesses that they ran--consulting, bottled water, fintech payment service--Abrams and her business partner, Hodgson, blend their personal narratives with hard facts and lessons to create an easily digestible how-to for running a business. Readers learn about such principles as the Three C's of Growth ("Consumers + Commerce = Capital) and how that growth can be stymied by not having an adequate plan in place. The end of each chapter contains "Level Up Lessons," which sum up the key findings and emphasize concepts the authors believe are particularly important, making the narrative accessible to any reader looking for business advice. The authors could have easily taken the safe route by simply sharing the story of how one thing led to another with their businesses or providing a straightforward, chronological account of their success. Instead, they dig deeper and offer candid exploration of nearly every aspect of their businesses, including good, bad, and occasionally devastating outcomes. Throughout, the authors open up in an appealing way, owning up to their mistakes, and they directly address many currently accepted principles that work against small-business owners--e.g., the difficulty gaining access to capital. They also show us how to manage unexpected changes in partnerships, which they navigated during Abrams' political rise. "With Stacey's responsibilities at the Capitol heating up," writes Hodgson, "we approached this new phase of our partnership and personal goals with the same discipline and efficiency we always did. We had a frank discussion about how her expertise served the new company."
A book packed with insight and inspiration from two successful entrepreneurs.
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"Abrams, Stacey: LEVEL UP." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2022. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A693214787/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1fd64f7c. Accessed 23 Jan. 2025.
Level Up: Rise above the Hidden Forces Holding Your Business Back. By Stacey Abrams and Lara Hodgson. Feb. 2022. 208p. Penguin/Portfolio, $26 (9780593539828). 658.421.
This outstanding book from multihyphenate Abrams and business partner Hodgson along with journalist Heather Cabot is essential reading for every current and potential small-business owner. Over the span of approximately 10 years, Abrams and Hodgson created three markedly different businesses. The two initially started a small consulting firm then pivoted to a product-based business manufacturing and selling specialized bottled water and eventually founded a unique and inventive financial-technology company. They share the many lessons learned from both their successes and their failures and provide information about networking and financing resources, particularly for minority- and female-owned small businesses. Abrams and Hodgson strike a perfect balance in addressing both the abstract and practical aspects of small-business ownership. There are several especially compelling topics throughout the book. First and foremost, small businesses often act as temporary lenders for large corporate buyers because of the typical payment terms involved in sales transactions. In addition, many small businesses end up failing because, for a multitude of reasons, they simply cannot scale up successfully. This brilliantly written, deeply insightful look at small-business ownership is a must-have for public and academic libraries.--Jennifer Michaelson
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 American Library Association
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Michaelson, Jennifer. "Level Up: Rise above the Hidden Forces Holding Your Business Back." Booklist, vol. 118, no. 11, 1 Feb. 2022, p. 5. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A693527321/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=76b4d0e1. Accessed 23 Jan. 2025.
Bolden, Tonya SPEAK UP, SPEAK OUT National Geographic Kids (Children's None) $17.99 1, 4 ISBN: 978-1-4263-7236-0
A comprehensive biography of Shirley Chisholm's political career.
Born in the U.S. to Bajan immigrants in 1924, "Fighting Shirley Chisholm" was raised and educated in both Barbados and the United States. As a teacher and administrator, she labored to improve the welfare of children in New York and championed legislation that supported low-income families and disadvantaged groups all over the country. Dedicated and unrelenting in her passion to serve "the workaday folk who make up most of the nation," Chisholm worked her way up to becoming a congresswoman. The book describes how she was forced to battle racism and sexism en route to becoming the first Black person to seek a major party's nomination for president of the United States. Readers will learn how Chisholm navigated an educational and political system bent on keeping women like her disempowered. The strength of Bolden's skill as a researcher is evident; chapter by chapter, she provides succinct but critical context around the motivations and movements of Chisholm's political career. A foreword by Stacey Abrams helps establish that Chisholm's legacy is one of political innovation as someone who forged a path for others to follow. This informative book has an engaging narrative structure. The use of repetition and inclusion of memorable pearls of wisdom attributed to Chisholm add a poetic tone.
An insightful and focused profile of a political trailblazer. (maps, author's note, bibliography, photos) (Biography. 12-14)
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"Bolden, Tonya: SPEAK UP, SPEAK OUT." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2022. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A690892163/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=54ad31d5. Accessed 23 Jan. 2025.
QUOTED: "This engaging, edifying, delightfully nerdy childhood retrospective from one of today's inspirational leaders speaks volumes."
Abrams, Stacey STACEY'S EXTRAORDINARY WORDS Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins (Children's None) $19.99 12, 28 ISBN: 978-0-06-320947-3
Before Stacey Abrams became today's leading voting rights activist and the first Black woman in American history to become a gubernatorial candidate, she was a spelling bee hopeful.
Stacey is a kid who understands the power of language. Ushered from infancy into the world of books by her librarian mother, she is a devoted student of the dictionary and a diligent young linguist in her own right, squirreling away words in a dedicated notebook. Quiet and awkward, she finds refuge and clarity in reading and writing. When she is nominated by her second grade teacher, Mrs. Blakeslee, to participate in the school spelling bee, Stacey is thrilled. However there is one problem--she will be competing alongside Jake, the class bully, whom she has always shrunk from; but, "perhaps at this spelling bee she would be braver." Readers follow Stacey as she painstakingly prepares, steps onto the competition stage--not once, but many times--and ultimately finds her voice with the loving support of her wise momma. The text is well turned, delivering both emotional resonance and compelling, albeit unromanticized, messages about the value of perseverance and the importance of speaking up for what is right. Thomas' bold, vibrant digital illustrations use spotlights as a motif, subtly foreshadowing young Stacey's future as a public speaker, and excel at depicting multiple scenes on the same page to create a sense of parallel action. Jake is White, and several illustrations include diverse representation.
This engaging, edifying, delightfully nerdy childhood retrospective from one of today's inspirational leaders speaks volumes. (Picture book autobiography. 4-8)
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"Abrams, Stacey: STACEY'S EXTRAORDINARY WORDS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2022. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A688199547/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=db7d1011. Accessed 23 Jan. 2025.
QUOTED: "charming and powerful."
Stacey's Extraordinary Words. By Stacey Abrams. Illus. by Kitt Thomas. Jan. 2022. 40p. HlarperCollins/Balzer+Bray, $19.99 (9780063209473). K-Gr. 2.
Abrams, former member of the Georgia House of Representatives, longtime voting-rights activist, and best-selling author here focuses on her childhood fascination with words and her realization of how powerful they can be, using a grade school spelling bee to anchor a lesson in perseverance. Abrams' fictional story--inspired by how she lost her first spelling bee by one word, and what that loss, and her later comeback victory, taught her--is both exciting and relatable (little Stacey finds words and reading a refuge when she feels awkward, out-of-place, or has been bullied). The digital illustrations highlight the nervous drama of a spelling bee, while the hand lettering throughout makes Stacey's favorite words look vibrant and exciting. In the first bee, the class bully wins by a word, but Stacey wins in her own way by giving a polite but crushing comment, learning that words can be used to speak up for others. After the defeat, Stacey's mother reminds her of an important word, "perseverance," which becomes Stacey's comeback word, until she finally wins a bee three years later. Charming and powerful.--Connie Fletcher
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 American Library Association
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Fletcher, Connie. "Stacey's Extraordinary Words." Booklist, vol. 118, no. 9-10, 1 Jan. 2022, p. 81. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A692710876/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=92ba46e2. Accessed 23 Jan. 2025.
WHILE JUSTICE SLEEPSBy Stacey Abrams
One approaches a legal thriller rooted in high-stakes Washington politics with a certain trepidation -- and a curiosity deepened, in this case, by Stacey Abrams's chosen setting: the U.S. Supreme Court.
Questions proliferate. Will there be actual Republicans and Democrats? Will the politics feel authentic -- as they did, for example, in Allen Drury's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic from the 1950s, ''Advise and Consent''?
Will the justices -- as in life -- be divided by ideology as well as by their disparate and often quirky personas? Will the author truly try to represent the hermetic world of the court or, hardest of all, the secretive and often byzantine process through which it renders its decisions?
Much depends on her intentions. Does she pitch the book to the small and picky audience that truly knows the world she purports to portray, while trying to bring the less sophisticated along for the ride? Or, seeking to engage a mass audience more interested in entertainment than authenticity, will she use the high-concept setting for a purpose both less and more ambitious: selling books?
In this case, the interest in such choices is heightened by the identity of the author. Any observer of politics knows that Abrams is a charismatic and talented former state legislator and voting rights activist who is likely to run for governor of Georgia in 2022. One expects a book written by an ambitious practicing politician to be, well, politic.
It is therefore small surprise that explicitly partisan politics plays little role, and that Abrams stints on judicial ideology. Still, her enterprise impresses on several counts: that she is willing to risk the jaundiced eye of readers unsympathetic to her public career; that she has the stuff to assay fiction in a new and challenging genre; and that amid an exceedingly busy life she cares enough about the form to undertake the demanding business of turning an idea into a novel. So the only fair question is not what she might have written, but whether she succeeds on the terms she set herself.
[ Read our profile of Stacey Abrams . ]
At the outset, the customary conventions of legal thrillerdom require quickly immersing the reader in murky but momentous events -- this is not, after all, ''Madame Bovary.'' In page after page of efficient and serviceable prose, Abrams creates an exceedingly convoluted but potentially intriguing landscape.
Variously:
The seemingly misanthropic and possibly paranoid Associate Justice Howard Wynn insults the president of the United States to his face; bemoans the ravages of Boursin's syndrome, an apparently degenerative brain disease that is sapping his mental acuity; inveighs against the capacity of humans to deploy scientific breakthroughs for dangerous ends; refers to himself as a threat to national security; harries a nurse who has been blackmailed into spying on him; designs chess-related clues to his investigation of undescribed matters in a case pending before the court; and sequesters them for one of his law clerks to decode -- all before lapsing into a coma induced by what may be a suicide attempt. Whereupon the nurse, contrary to instructions from her unknown blackmailer, saves Wynn's life by calling 911.
The protagonist, Wynn's African-American law clerk, Avery Keene, is awakened by a call from her crack-addicted mother demanding cash to pay off her supplier. Avery, we perceive, is a self-sufficient loner: Her father is dead, her mother abusive and her credit cards maxed out from covering her mom's latest stint in rehab. Nonetheless, Avery hastens to rescue her ungrateful parent.
In India, the head of a biotech company, Dr. Indira Srinivasan, broods over her own debilitating degenerative condition and, of more immediate concern, the fact that President Brandon Stokes opposes a merger between her company, Advar, and GenWorks -- which, as it happens, is run by her former lover Nigel Cooper.
By the time Indira and Nigel end a tense but enigmatic telephone call, we know that Indira is harboring a secret concerning a lethal-sounding project called Tigris, which, somehow, involves President Stokes; that the merger is pending before the Supreme Court; that the outcome of the case will determine the viability of Advar and, it seems, much more; and that Wynn is perceived to be the swing vote. After hanging up, Nigel places a peremptory call to the majority leader of the Senate demanding a meeting with him and the speaker of the House.
All that's missing, it seems, is a murder. Not to worry. By Page 27 the nurse's mysterious blackmailer, an ostensible D.C. cop indignant at Wynn's survival, has put a bullet through her brain. But not before she blurts out Avery's name, putting the resolute 20-something in the cross hairs of a global conspiracy.
All this busyness breeds a fascination of its own -- and yet more questions. Can all these prospective plotlines possibly be relevant? How in the world does Abrams propose to bring them all together? Will the narrative cohere, or collapse from sheer exhaustion?
Here Chekhov's dictum leaps to mind: ''One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off.'' By that standard, Abrams must deploy a firing squad. But this much is clear: The author means to keep her characters and the reader exceedingly busy -- and Avery in serious trouble.
As the story progresses, Abrams's current deficits as a novelist become apparent. To say the least, ''While Justice Sleeps'' epitomizes the phrase ''plot driven.''
Avery lacks a fully developed persona, and frequently reacts to alarming events in ways that are emotionally and logically implausible. Some of her most striking characteristics -- she turns out to be a chess genius with an eidetic memory and a talent for breaking and entering -- are functional rather than organic. Too often, she and her supporting cast are whomever the story requires them to be.
In consequence, many secondary characters are human signifiers -- Justice Wynn's unloving second wife is a cartoon trophy dragon, and the vultures of cable news make Tucker Carlson look like the quintessence of journalistic sobriety. Similarly, the dialogue quite frequently seems designed to convey information or personify attitude rather than approximate speech.
Concurrently, one is struck by Abrams's considerable powers of invention. Not only does she succeed in keeping the pages turning, but the fusillade she triggers bespeaks a genuine gift for weaving a daunting number of plot threads into her labyrinthine but accelerating design. Her narrative never pauses for breath -- let alone contemplation.
Neither, it seems, does Avery. Swiftly she plunges into a murderous maelstrom of potentially lethal presidential machinations; a lifesaving scientific breakthrough with an apocalyptic downside; several murders; and a relationship with Justice Wynn's estranged son -- all while striving to save herself and the justice and, in the bargain, the rule of law. Seems like enough.
Readers searching for dimensional characters whose inner lives inform a consistently credible narrative won't find them in this book; its climactic events, and the behaviors of the principals, require a particularly willful suspension of disbelief. Nor do Abrams's corridors of power exude a sense of real-life verisimilitude -- they, too, exist to serve her humming machine. But those desirous of perils and surprises will encounter them in abundance. On that score, Abrams has realized what surely was her chief ambition -- not to enlighten, but to entertain.
Richard North Patterson is a lawyer, novelist and political commentator. He is currently a columnist for The Bulwark. WHILE JUSTICE SLEEPS By Stacey Abrams 384 pp. Doubleday. $28.
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Patterson, Richard North. "Full Court Press." The New York Times Book Review, 6 June 2021, p. 16(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A664242474/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=45d37893. Accessed 23 Jan. 2025.
For Stacey Abrams, the business of politics and the craft of storytelling overlap
STACEY ABRAMS wrote her first novel at 14. It was a soul-searching tale called "My Diary of Angst". "I was very tortured as a teenager," she recalls with a laugh. There is nothing tortured about Ms Abrams now. At 47, she is a champion of voting rights and a household name across America. She is widely credited with swinging the state of Georgia to the Democrats, helping to send Joe Biden to the White House and two Democratic newcomers--one black, one Jewish--to the Senate. Even among her admirers, few may have realised that, in her spare time, she was still writing novels.
The secret is out with the publication of "While Justice Sleeps", a political thriller about a Supreme Court justice in a coma and his mixed-race clerk, Avery Keene, who must save both him and the world. It follows eight romance novels written under the pen-name Selena Montgomery, which Ms Abrams began at Yale Law School and continued in the early years of her career as a lawyer and legislator in Atlanta.
All these star young, brilliant African-American women, forced to confront their fears and overcome dastardly villains, with the requisite heaving bosoms--or, in this first thriller, and the first of Ms Abrams's novels published under her real name, a single modest kiss. She started writing fiction because she wanted to see characters who looked like her achieving remarkable things, she says in an interview from her home in Atlanta. Making black lives visible--making them count, in every sense--is the overarching plot-line of both her literary and political endeavours.
"The more you see of possibility, the more you internalise that it could be true for you," she explains. Imagining alternative realities is, she says, as much a part of public as literary life: "Politics is about creating the world you want to see." It is a lesson Ms Abrams learned early from her parents, growing up among the "genteel poor" of Mississippi. "They wanted us to imagine that justice was real," she remembers. However deficient it seemed in practice, "that never stopped them from doing the work to make it so."
Her mother was a college librarian, her father a dockworker, before both became Methodist ministers. Ms Abrams and her five siblings were immersed in books and their father's bedtime stories. Family life was infused with volunteering and a sense of service: "I tease them that you had these two black people and their six black children trying to fix Mississippi." Nowadays her siblings serve as first readers and advisers on her fiction. One is a district-court judge, another an anthropologist, a third a biologist; she drew on each for "While Justice Sleeps".
Writing and publishing fiction takes grit. False starts and dead ends are routine. Ms Abrams learned that early, too. She wanted her first book to be an espionage tale, but was told no one would publish an unknown female writer. She tossed in a hot love affair, and was off. Her romances have sold over 100,000 copies; the first three will soon be re-released. She applied the lesson to her political career: "You may want to do something one way, but it may not work out the way you planned--so you just have to find a different way."
As an 18-year-old freshman at Spelman College, Ms Abrams made a spreadsheet plan for her life. She aimed to be a bestselling spy novelist by 24 and mayor of Atlanta by 35. She was elected to Georgia's House of Representatives in 2006, leading the minority Democratic caucus from 2011 to 2017. Then she decided to run for governor, becoming America's first black and female gubernatorial candidate from a major party. But even the most carefully plotted lives have unexpected twists. In 2018 she lost a tight race marred by credible accusations that her opponent suppressed tens of thousands of mostly minority votes.
It was then, Ms Abrams says, "that my story really started". Rather than continuing to seek office, she focused on the systemic problem of access to voting, founding two non-profit groups and becoming a national political star. Faced with another obstacle, she swerved round it.
Her novels are stuffed with both action and arcane expertise, diving into specialised subjects from bioethics to cognitive science to competitive poker. In "While Justice Sleeps" Avery must unravel an international conspiracy involving a corrupt president, genetic warfare, an obscure disease and an equally abstruse chess strategy. The byzantine plot is sometimes hard to follow; a voracious consumer of culture, from "Star Trek" to classic literature, Ms Abrams throws everything into the mix. She fits her writing into her schedule where she can, finishing the book last year in the heat of the election drama.
The lives of others
Storytelling skills inform everything she does, she says. The challenge may be stopping a shadowy network wrecking a community (as in some of her previous books); or, in real life, "how do you make sure that we get climate action or criminal-justice reform?" Either way, "the architecture is always the same". Every problem can be analysed using the tripartite structure of a fictional protagonist's journey: what a character (or citizen) wants, why they want it, and how they will get there. Most important, she reckons, is helping people see themselves as active agents in their own narratives. "I try to tell a story of where we are and where we can go."
Her most helpful writerly tool may be a knack for putting herself in someone else's shoes, and encouraging others to do the same. In the statehouse she presented herself as a "pragmatic progressive" who could work with opponents. She describes a friendship with one that developed as they swapped life stories early in the morning in an empty chamber. That helped her convince the ardently pro-life Republican to vote against an abortion bill he was expected to support. "I used my storytelling, but also my listening to the stories of others," she says. "You cannot influence behaviour if you dismiss the core ideology that people hold"; and you cannot understand that "unless you inhabit" their point of view.
At this fraught time, with Americans locked into two opposing narratives about last year's elections, do the tools of fiction offer hope? Ms Abrams doubts that today's chasm can be completely bridged. But she believes in the power of stories, told one-to-one across the divide. "Our obligation", she says, "is to get as close as we can, as often as we can."
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
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"The character arc of justice; Politics and fiction." The Economist, 15 May 2021, p. 73(US). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A661657755/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0916e4cd. Accessed 23 Jan. 2025.
Stacey Abrams, the Georgia politician and romance writer , whose latest novel is the thriller ''While Justice Sleeps,'' recommends ''Master of the Senate,'' by Robert Caro: ''It is a seminal work on the nature of power, the limits of the presidency and the awesome demands politics make on the soul.''
What books are on your night stand?
I read several genres at once, rotating through as the mood strikes me. My long read right now is ''The Coldest Winter,'' by David Halberstam. My sibling book club picked ''Ring Shout,'' by P. Djeli Clark, which is paced wonderfully so it will not be over too soon (but luckily before our call). A recent discussion with my niece reminded me how much I love fairy tales of all kinds, so I decided to dive into ''Tales of Japan: Traditional Stories of Monsters and Magic.''
Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).
I had it a few weeks ago. Georgia's mercurial weather shifted from an unreasonable 48 degrees to a balmy 75 degrees over the weekend. Knowing how soon it could be 25 degrees or 89 degrees, I filled my water bottle, poured myself a glass of Martinelli's apple juice, and picked up ''Black Sun,'' by Rebecca Roanhorse. Soon, I was outside on the patio in the springtime, midafternoon, with my feet up on the ottoman and my reading glasses perched on my nose.
What's your favorite book no one else has heard of?
''What's Bred in the Bone,'' by Robertson Davies, is a novel about a man whose life contained much more than the surface would suggest, including espionage and angels. Davies was a distinguished Canadian author, and this is Book 2 of his Cornish Trilogy (''The Rebel Angels'' and ''The Lyre of Orpheus'' are first and third). I usually recommend the book to folks who ask me for a good book list. Rarely has anyone heard of him or the novel, which is a shame.
Do you count any books as guilty pleasures, or comfort reads?
No, I appreciate good writing and strong storytelling -- whether the book is a serial killer thriller or a philosopher's biography. When I began publishing, I wrote under the pen name Selena Montgomery for my romantic suspense novels. I started publishing just as Google became a ''thing'' in our world. At the same time my first novel was being released, I had also published my masterwork on the operational dissonance in the unrelated business income tax. I made the very reasonable assumption that someone looking for romance would not trust a tax policy wonk. I've been privileged to write in romance, thriller, leadership and politics. Nothing that tells a good story should ever cause chagrin.
Has a book ever brought you closer to another person, or come between you?
I am the second of six children, and we grew up in a house of books. Our mom was a librarian and our parents would take us to the public library every summer to stock up on entertainment. When one of my siblings faced a difficult time, we created the book club as a place to escape and to connect. Getting to understand one another as adults through our book picks and the conversations we have has been an unexpected delight, and I am mildly afraid of them sometimes ...
What moves you most in a work of literature?
The tragic misunderstanding is a familiar trope, but when done well, the device can rip your heart out. I despise novels that try to manipulate the reader by refusing to solve obvious misapprehensions. If I find myself yelling at the protagonist to just tell her, or for the dupe to simply read the letter he dropped, then I'm likely to put the book down and walk away. But when the writer has crafted a sincere or, better yet, sly confusion, the ensuing tragedy and its ultimate reveal are gut-wrenching. Two of my favorites writers who do this well are Elizabeth Lowell and Pearl Cleage.
Which books got you hooked on romance?
''Jane Eyre'' was the first romance I ever read, full of tortured souls and broken people. Then my older sister introduced me to the wonderful world of Harlequin romances, which arrived in a four-pack every month.
How do you organize your books?
Fiction on one side of the shelves (poetry, classics, general fiction, romance, thrillers, comic books, etc.) and nonfiction on the other side (political biography, general biography, history, science, social science and so on). My mother began her career as a college librarian before becoming a United Methodist minister. I was raised on the Dewey Decimal System and believe in its innate charms.
What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves?
''Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of American Consensus.'' In order to be an effective leader, I work hard to understand the theories, beliefs and dreams of those who differ from me. I also learn best by contrasting my sense of leadership with others who seem to be my antithesis in style or substance.
What's the best book you've ever received as a gift?
''Ender's Game,'' by Orson Scott Card. I recognize the challenges with Card's personal beliefs, but long before I learned of them, I read ''Ender's Game'' and then every other book he'd penned. Controversial writers and even their divisive writings can compel others to abandon or disclaim them. I approach reading as I do my public service: trying to create space for forgiveness and grace, while never letting go of my own moral code.
What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?
Voracious, avid and unpretentious are probably the best descriptors. Because I had access to an entire library from the time I learned to read, I consumed a wide range of books. Among my favorites are ''Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears,'' by Verna Aardema, ''The Phantom Tollbooth,'' by Norton Juster, ''Silas Marner,'' by George Eliot, Edith Hamilton's ''Mythology'' and ''Helen Keller: The Story of My Life.''
If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?
''Master of the Senate,'' by Robert Caro -- it is a seminal work on the nature of power, the limits of the presidency and the awesome demands politics make on the soul.
You're organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
Colson Whitehead, Charles Dickens and Octavia Butler -- fascinating writers who carved out their own dominions in literature and who, in wholly unique fashion, changed writing for the rest of us.
What books do you think best capture your own political principles?
''Pedagogy of the Oppressed,'' by Paulo Freire, to understand my commitment to engaging and centering the disadvantaged and marginalized in my politics, entrepreneurship and activism. The In Death series, by J. D. Robb, centers on a broken, brilliant detective who has to learn to reconcile her core morality with the accommodations we must make if others are going to be included in the process. ''The Power Broker,'' by Robert Caro, describes how bureaucracy and power can create beauty, function and opportunity while also serving as a reminder of the casual cruelty of racism, classism and rank arrogance. ''Down the Line,'' by Bayard Rustin, written by the man who helped design and execute the March on Washington and so much of the architecture of the civil rights movement, is a meditation on leadership and vision and how to sublimate your personal ambitions to a larger objective. ''Prophet of Innovation,'' by Thomas K. McGraw, which is the biography of a conservative economist who grappled with the cycles of progress and destruction in our economy, an ever-present challenge for anyone who wants to be effective in politics.
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"Stacey Abrams." The New York Times Book Review, 9 May 2021, p. 6(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A661174589/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4794d747. Accessed 23 Jan. 2025.
STACEY ABRAMS opens her book, Our Time Is Now, with an anecdote about talking to her grandmother in 2018 when she was making her run for governor.
The Georgia Democrat's grandmother grew up in Jim crow Mississippi and, according to Abrams, told her how when she got her first opportunity to vote, in 1968, she was too frightened to go to the polling place. Abrams writes that this "perversion of democracy continues to play out across our country every day."
"Voter suppression," she continues, "works its might by first tripping and causing to stumble the unwanted voter, then by convincing those who see the obstacle course to forfeit the race without even starting to run."
The problem with using her grandmother's story to illustrate this point is that, after her initial hesitation, her grandmother indeed went and voted--just as pretty much all the people Abrams alleges are being scared away from the polls today are going to vote, too.
When Abrams writes that "across America, would-be voters continue to turn away like my grandmother did," it's literally true--because they aren't turning away at all.
This isn't in any way to discount her grandmother's fear, born of living for so long under a system of racial tyranny. But the contemporary relevance of her experience is almost nil. In the old Jim crow era, most blacks were barred from voting in the south by transparently pretextual measures, and sometimes by outright intimidation and violence; in what is supposedly the new Jim crow era, blacks are full participants and often determine the outcome of races, as they did in the Georgia runoffs last January.
Spot the contradiction in this sentence that evidently escaped Abrams and her editors at Henry Holt. She writes of her experience running for governor: "I watched in real time as the conflicts in our evolving nation became fodder for racist commercials, horrific suppression--and the largest turnout of voters of color in Georgia's history."
Stacey Abrams is one of the great founts of disinformation in contemporary American political life. She's managed to convince almost all Democrats to accept her ridiculous contention that she was the rightful winner of her 2018 gubernatorial race against Brian Kemp, which she never conceded. Her framework of looking at disputes over voting rules not as matters reasonable people can disagree about, or as fights for partisan advantage, but as an existential struggle over the attempted imposition of a new system of racist repression has prevailed on the center-left. Finally, she's led the way in characterizing the new Georgia electoral law as the onset of Jim Crow 2.0, prompting denunciations of her state from corporate America and leading Major League Baseball to pull the AllStar Game from Atlanta.
She's paid no price for her dishonesty and hysteria; rather, she's been celebrated in verse and song. She's been featured in Vogue ("Can Stacey Abrams save American democracy?" the headline asked) and was somewhere in the very outer orbit of Joe Biden's VP short list. The way that Senator Elizabeth Warren slammed the new Georgia law is typical of her party's Abrams-centric view of Georgia: "The Republican who is sitting in Stacey Abrams' chair just signed a despicable voter suppression bill into law to take Georgia back to Jim Crow."
Abrams is treated as an authority on all matters related to voting, when, in reality, the beginning of wisdom on such questions is realizing how utterly wrong she is.
IN Our Time Is Now, published last year, Abrams writes that "modern-day suppression has swapped rabid dogs and cops with billy clubs for restrictive voter ID and tangled rules for participation."
She contends that "the sheer complexity of the national voting apparatus smooths suppression into a nearly seamless operation." Since Barack Obama's election in 2008, according to Abrams, "we witnessed a 'power grab' from the minority desperate to hold on to power." Republicans are "using convoluted rules to make it harder to register and stay on the rolls, cast a ballot, or have that ballot counted."
If the aim in Georgia has been to disenfranchise people, as Abrams claims, though, the changes to the electoral system over the last couple of decades haven't been well suited to the task. Georgia has had no-excuse absentee voting for 15 years. It has had widely available early voting for more than twelve years. It adopted automatic registration in 2016, making registering to vote the default option when people get a driver's license. This change was implemented administratively by none other than Brian Kemp. People can also register online (although it requires a driver's license). Prior to the 2020 election, the head of the Georgia chapter of the League of Women Voters told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that so many Georgians were already registered to vote, it was hard to find anyone new to sign up.
This isn't the profile of a state consumed with keeping people from the polls. Indeed, Abrams makes the odd concession partway through her book that "my home state of Georgia allows both early voting and absentee balloting, as do several of the more aggressive voter suppression states like Ohio, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Florida." Why, if they want to suppress the vote, these states would make these options widely available while some reliable blue states don't is left unexplained.
By any reasonable measure, Georgia has been experiencing a voter-participation bonanza. In the 2018 election, 57 percent of Georgia's registered voters cast a ballot, almost as high as turnout in the presidential election of 2016 and way up from 2014. Turnout in the presidential election of 2020 exceeded that of the banner Barack Obama election year of 2008. And turnout in the Senate runoffs doubled the turnout from the previous highest-ever runoff, in 2008, and beat the numbers from the 2016 presidential election.
Meanwhile, 25 percent of new voter registrations in Georgia between 2016 and 2020 were of black voters, more than any other ethnic group. Metropolitan Atlanta accounted for more than half of the state's new registrations. Abrams can take some credit for this through her voter-registration drives, but these numbers don't scream, "New Jim Crow."
In her 2018 gubernatorial race, she lost to Brian Kemp, the sitting secretary of state, 50.2 percent to 48.8 percent, a close result but not a razor-thin one. The threshold for an automatic recount in Georgia is a margin of 0.5 percent or less. Abrams fell considerably short of that, but it didn't stop her from litigating over the result and casting a cloud over the legitimacy of Kemp's win.
She made much of Kemp's running for governor while he was still the secretary of state responsible for supervising the state's elections. Yet Georgia's constitution allows that, and it's not unprecedented. In 2006, Democrat Cathy Cox ran for her party's gubernatorial nomination while serving as secretary of state. Regardless, localities count the votes, not the secretary of state's office.
In the aggregate, as noted earlier, her case that she lost because of suppression doesn't make any sense. Abrams boasts that she got 1.9 million votes, the highest number of Democratic votes in Georgia history; turned out more black voters than had voted in the 2014 election for governor; tripled turnout rates for Latino and Asian/Pacific Islander voters; and increased youth turnout by 139 percent.
Yet she still alleges that she "ran against one of the worst purveyors of voter suppression and xenophobia since George Wallace." By her account, she was "dogged by a racist demagogue who carefully disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of Georgians and who controlled the levers of the election. I watched him be rewarded for joining a growing pool of political leaders who revel in a pervasive, systemic process of stripping the right to vote from some and building obstacles to access for others."
She refused to acknowledge that she had lost. "In conceding the election," she explains, "I would validate the system that slashed voters from the rolls, ensured thousands could not cast ballots, and blocked thousands more from being counted."
WHAT of her specific charges? She complains of polling places' getting shut down prior to the election, putting it in the darkest possible light. "One of the favored schemes during Jim Crow," she writes, "was making polling places so difficult to reach that voters simply gave up." She cites a report in the Journal-Constitution that between 2012 and 2018, 8 percent of Georgia's polling places were shuttered and almost 40 percent relocated. But these decisions were all undertaken by counties on their own, overwhelmingly to save money or because precincts were located in dilapidated buildings that weren't accessible to people with disabilities.
Clay County is typical. One of the least populated counties in the state, it is 60 percent African-American and went for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020, both by about ten points. The county consolidated from five precincts to one in 2015, in part because of the greater availability of early and absentee voting. The county's election supervisor at the time told the Journal-Constitution that the proposal met with little opposition from the county election board and that some of the cinderblock precincts were in such disrepair that poll workers didn't want to work at them.
Then there's Randolph County, another lightly populated, majority-black, Democratic jurisdiction. It caused an uproar when it considered consolidating seven of its nine precincts before the 2018 election. Brian Kemp came out against the plan. The county backed off, and then a year later closed three precincts, this time making sure that the locations were disproportionately used by white voters. But the rationale was the same--the county didn't have the money to upgrade the ramshackle aluminum buildings, especially when they weren't heavily trafficked (one precinct had just 73 registered active voters).
Abrams should be more understanding of the practical considerations at work in such decisions, given that she used exactly this kind of reasoning in 2011 to justify slashing the days available for early voting in Georgia. As a member of the state legislature, she cosponsored legislation, which was passed and signed into law, to cut the days for early voting from 45 all the way down to 21.
Why? Abrams explains that early voting could be "a cost-prohibitive burden" to local governments. Smaller jurisdictions, she writes, complained they would have to cut back in other budgetary areas to maintain the longer period of early voting, and the expense of keeping a facility open was the same whether people were using it or not.
In 2018, she also made a big deal of the so-called list maintenance--or, in more pejorative terms, "voter purges"--that Kemp oversaw as secretary of state. She writes, in sinister tones, that Kemp "strongly favored the 'use it or lose it' power in Georgia, where he removed over 1.4 million voters in a state with 6 million registered users. In July 2017, he removed more than half a million voters in a single day, reducing the number of registered voters in Georgia by 8 percent. An estimated 107,000 of these voters were removed through 'use it or lose it.'"
No one should object, though, to clean, up-to-date voter rolls; in fact, it's a practice mandated by the federal Motor Voter Act. Clearly, if people die or move out of the state, they should be taken off the rolls. As for the "use it or lose it" rule that Abrams finds so objectionable, it isn't harsh or unreasonable.
Under "use it or lose it," if a registered voter didn't vote for three years, he'd get notified in the mail. If he didn't reply, he'd be put in the "inactive" file but still be allowed to vote. If he didn't vote in the next two federal elections and didn't answer after getting notified again, he'd finally be struck from the rolls. The process took about seven years. After a change in 2019, part of a legislative package to make Abrams-supported lawsuits go away, the timelines were stretched out a bit, and the process now runs about nine years.
There's never been a case of thousands of people complaining that they've been erroneously knocked off the rolls. Besides, people struck from the rolls can reregister, provided they still live in the state and are otherwise eligible.
Another count in the Abrams indictment is that registrations were sent to voting purgatory, the so-called "pending" file, for no good reason. Under the policy of "exact match," she alleges, minor discrepancies were a pretext to deny registrations. "This use of exact match," she writes, "led to 53,000 voter registrations being held hostage in 2018, 80 percent of whom were people of color and 70 percent of whom were black voters."
This, also, is much ado. At the time, if information on a voter registration didn't match a driver's license or Social Security records, the voter got 26 months to address the problem. In the meantime, the voter went to the "pending" file, which didn't keep anyone from voting. As long as the voter could verify his information with an ID at a polling place (which is required in any case), he could vote.
This arrangement was also updated slightly in 2019. Now, voters with mismatching information go to "Active-ID Required" status, meaning they have to show ID before they vote absentee or in person.
IN short, the Abrams parade of horribles about 2018 doesn't hold up to even modest scrutiny. Nonetheless, she moved on from alleging voter suppression in 2018 to alleging yet more voter suppression in 2021, this time over Georgia's new election law.
On CNN in March, Abrams denounced the changes: "I do absolutely agree that it's racist. It is a redux of Jim Crow in a suit and tie."
"The only connection that we can find," she explained, "is that more people of color voted, and it changed the outcome of elections in a direction that Republicans do not like. And so, instead of celebrating better access and more participation, their response is to try to eliminate access to voting for primarily communities of color."
Note, by the way, the shift from saying just two years earlier that Georgia's approach was suppressive to saying it had led to "better access and more participation." That aside, Abrams claimed "a direct correlation" between, among other things, "the use of vote by mail and a direct increase in the number of people of color voting."
This, like so much that Abrams says, isn't true. In 2016, according to a report by the progressive Brennan Center for Justice, whites used vote-by-mail at slightly higher rates than blacks in Georgia. The trend ticked the other way in 2020, when roughly 30 percent of blacks voted by mail while 24 percent of whites did. Whites still constituted the majority of vote-by-mail voters, although at a lower percentage than in 2016 (down from 67 percent to 54 percent).
What's more, a study published by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research shows that the emphasis on no-excuse absentee voting as a key determinant of turnout is misconceived. It found that in 2020, turnout increased equally whether a state had newly adopted no-excuse absentee voting or not. In Texas, no-excuse absentee voting was available only to voters 65 and older. Nonetheless, 64-year-olds in Texas voted at about the same rate as 65-year-olds.
In any case, after considering scaling back no-excuse absentee voting, the Georgia legislature left it intact. More and more commentators have begun to recognize that the Georgia law isn't the travesty it is advertised as. The law expands hours available for early voting. It keeps ballot drop boxes, which had been a pandemic-driven innovation in Georgia, although it creates tighter rules around them (voters can always simply drop their absentee ballots in the mail). Perhaps its most notorious provision, a ban on giving food and drink to voters in line within 150 feet of a polling place, is based on a similar provision in New York State and is meant to forbid politicking near the polls, not to starve and dehydrate voters.
THERE are a number of provisions that Abrams should welcome in the Georgia law. She complains about the reliability of signature match in validating absentee ballots, noting that signatures can change over time. "Yet," she writes, "states use this mismatch as a reason to disqualify otherwise eligible voters from having their duly submitted ballots counted." The law dispenses with signature match. Instead, it requires that voters provide a driver's license or state-ID number to apply for a ballot and that they produce one of those numbers, or the last four digits of a Social Security number, when returning the ballot. (The voter still has to sign to attest that the information is correct.)
Abrams considers long lines at polling places another means of voter suppression. "In 2018," she writes, "Georgia posted the longest wait times in the nation for minority voters." But long lines have traditionally been a problem of poorly run jurisdictions, usually Democratic. Addressing this issue has been a focus of Republican secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, and the new law will force counties with long lines to reduce the size of the relevant precincts, or add new equipment or workers.
She complains about the handling of provisional ballots (which allow voters to vote even if there's a problem, on the assumption that it can be sorted out later). "In the hands of vote suppression masters," Abrams writes, "the provisional ballot provides not safety but a guarantee against full democratic rights."
First of all, before the advent of provisional ballots, which were mandated in the 2002 Help America Vote Act, a voter with a flawed registration or some other issue would simply have been turned away. Second, provisional ballots are inherently difficult for election administrators to deal with. They have to put the ballot in a secrecy slip and then must follow up to verify it, a time-consuming process.
In Georgia, many provisional ballots result from voters who are voting out-of-precinct. The new law attempts to diminish the need for such ballots by requiring people who show up at the wrong precinct to go to the right one if they arrive before 5 P.M. From 5 p.m. to 7 P.M., they can vote at the wrong precinct if they sign an affidavit saying that they can't get to the right one.
Abrams finds it nefarious when absentee ballots get rejected. A large share of these ballots are disqualified for not having arrived on time. Hence the rationale for another provision in the new law: A voter can no longer request a ballot later than eleven days prior to the election. This deadline is meant to keep voters from requesting ballots they can't return in time. According to Gabriel Sterling of the Georgia secretary of state's office, if ballots were requested more than ten days before the election, more than 90 percent of them were voted; if they were requested fewer than ten days before the election, only 52 percent were voted.
It's worth noting that other large claims Abrams makes about American elections don't accord with the facts, either. She makes much of the Supreme Court's decision in the 2013 Shelby case, which ended so-called pre-clearance--the requirement under the Voting Rights Act that the federal government sign off on any changes to the electoral system in places that had a history of disenfranchisement.
"The results," she writes, "have dramatically undermined access to full participation in our democracy." She continues, not putting too fine a point on it: "Without a Voting Rights Act-style oversight, voters of color once again face the specter of being outside the protections of our Constitution. Without a protected right to vote, the Shelby decision and the proliferation of anti-voting laws have destabilized the whole of our democratic experiment."
This isn't borne out. A paper by Kyle Raze, a Ph.D. candidate in economics at the University of Oregon, concludes: "The removal of preclearance requirements did not significantly reduce the relative turnout of eligible black voters."
She calls voter-ID provisions "a key tool in the suppression toolbox." No, not so either. According to a 2019 working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, "strict ID laws have no significant negative effect on registration or turnout, overall or for any subgroup defined by age, gender, race, or party affiliation. These results hold through a large number of specifications and robustness checks."
TO the extent that she's arguing in good faith, Abrams is wrong about so much because she is beholden to an extreme version of the convenience theory of voting--the notion that voters are easily discouraged and highly sensitive to how much effort it takes to vote. There's no doubt that turnout can be affected by radical changes in the voting system--the adoption of universal mail-in voting, which entails sending a ballot to everyone, seems to increase turnout perhaps by 2 to 4 percent. But run-of-the-mill changes don't make much difference.
As the authors of the aforementioned Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research study note, "in high-salience elections like 2020, there are probably very few marginal voters who base their decision to participate on the relative costs of one mode of voting over another, so long as the inconvenience and difficulty of in-person voting remains within reasonable bounds." From this perspective, the threshold question for voting is whether someone is interested and engaged in an election or not. Once someone is, he is going to vote regardless of the particular rules.
Certainly, this explanation best accords with Stacey Abrams's own experience. A talented base politician, she has excelled at motivating Democratic voters, who have turned out despite all the obstacles she says are in their way.
Or, to be more precise, probably because of all the obstacles she says are in their way. There are few more compelling means of engaging and firing up voters than to tell them that the other side is trying to take away their rights, especially if the message plays on emotional memories of a terrible time when this was actually true. Cynical? Sure. Effective? Absolutely. Abrams likely plans to run for governor again in 2022. If successful, she'll be the first candidate in American history to get "disenfranchised" all the way into a governor's mansion.
Mr. Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 National Review, Inc.
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Lowry, Richard. "Stacey Abrams, Fount of Disinformation: She says there's a new Jim Crow; here's the truth." National Review, vol. 73, no. 8, 3 May 2021, pp. 19+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A658613250/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9d4ba5cb. Accessed 23 Jan. 2025.
Abrams, Stacey WHILE JUSTICE SLEEPS Doubleday (Fiction None) $23.95 5, 11 ISBN: 978-0-385-54657-7
A progressive superstar pens her first political thriller.
Anyone who follows the news knows Abrams as a politician and voting rights activist. She's less well known as a novelist. Using the pseudonym Selena Montgomery, Abrams has published several works of romantic suspense. Her new novel begins when Supreme Court Justice Howard Wynn falls into a coma. His clerk Avery Keene is shocked to discover that her boss has made her his legal guardian and granted her power of attorney. The fate of one of the most powerful men in the world is in her hands—and her life is in danger. Abrams gives us nefarious doings in the world of biotech, a president with autocratic tendencies and questionable ethics, and a young woman struggling to unravel a conspiracy while staying one step ahead of the people who want her out of the way. Unfortunately, the author doesn't weave these intriguing elements into an enjoyable whole. Abrams makes some odd word choices, such as this: “The intricate knot she had twisted into her hair that morning bobbed cunningly as she neared her office.” The adverb cunningly is mystifying, and Abrams uses it in a similar way later on. There are disorienting shifts in point of view. And Abrams lavishes a great deal of attention on details that simply don’t matter, which makes the pace painfully slow. This is a fatal flaw in a suspense novel, but it may not be the most frustrating aspect of this book. For a protagonist who has gotten where she is by being smart, Avery makes some stunningly poor decisions. For example, the fact that she has a photographic memory is an important plot point and is clearly a factor in Justice Wynn’s decision to enlist her help. When she finds a piece of paper upon which is printed a long string of characters and the words "BURN UPON REVIEW," Avery memorizes the lines of numbers and letters—and then, even though she knows she’s being surveilled, she snaps a shot of the paper with her phone, thereby making the whole business of setting it on fire quite pointless.
More of a curiosity for political junkies than a satisfying story of international intrigue.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Abrams, Stacey: WHILE JUSTICE SLEEPS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2021. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A651594797/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f8619503. Accessed 23 Jan. 2025.
While Justice Sleeps. By Stacey Abrams. May 2021. 384p. Doubleday, $28 (9780385546577).
Known for her deft political organizing and passionate racial justice advocacy, Abrams is also the author of the nonfiction best-seller, Our Time Is Now (2020). She now displays her considerable talent for fiction in this gripping legal thriller. Justice Howard Wynn, an irascible lion of the Supreme Court, falls unexpectedly into a coma. His nurse fields a mysterious phone call, then disappears. Shadowy figures from Homeland Security, the FBI, and the international biotech industry confer urgently about a pending court decision with potentially earth-shattering consequences on which Justice Harris will be the swing vote. Coincidence? Not bloody likely. Yet who can untie this deadly knot of deception and global skulduggery? None other than Avery Keene, Justice Harris' brilliant and tenacious law clerk, who knows a thing or two about impossible odds. Assigned the unenviable task of serving as Justice Harris' legal guardian, Avery must also figure out who is plotting her boss' demise and why. With the help of her med school roommate, a young lawyer, and Wynn's hunky son, Avery tracks down fiendishly intricate clues leading to a horrifying secret that implicates powerful and dangerous people. Will Avery solve the final conundrum before it's too late? Will this delightful multiethnic Scooby-Doo gang prevail, or will they fall to the forces of ultimate evil? Will there be a sequel? Stay tuned, dear reader, stay tuned.--Lesley Williams
HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The buzz is loud and wholly deserved for this shrewd and exciting legal thriller by prominent voter-rights activist and best-selling Abrams.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 American Library Association
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Williams, Lesley. "While Justice Sleeps." Booklist, vol. 117, no. 15, 1 Apr. 2021, p. 30. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A660111200/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b7e52ef2. Accessed 23 Jan. 2025.
I kill a whole lot of people in my books," Stacey Abrams says with a smile. It's a sunny weekday morning in Atlanta, and the renowned voting rights activist, lawyer, and bestselling author is in her office, between meetings, chatting via Zoom about storytelling. "I've written serial killer novels. I wrote a novel about a religious fanatic and his very weird approach to his cult. I love writing propulsive stories that suck you in and hold you tight."
Abrams has written eight romantic suspense novels under the pen name Selena Montgomety--the first while in law school in the 1990s--and two page-turning nonfiction books. The latter titles, Minority Leader and Our Time Is Now, blend leadership advice, self-help, and memoir and have over 300,000 copies in print, according to Henry Holt.
Abrams's latest, the legal thriller While Justice Sleeps, is out in May from Doubleday. It stars a law clerk, Avery Keene, whose boss, a Supreme Court justice, appoints her as his legal guardian days before he falls into a coma. The justice, who was secretly researching a proposed merger between an American biotech company and an Indian genetics firm, has left Avery clues she must unravel to expose a conspiracy.
The spark for the novel came in 2008, while Abrams was at lunch with a lawyer friend, chatting about judges who hold lifetime appointments. "If you're an Article III judge, you can only be removed for high crimes and misdemeanors or death," Abrams explains. "So I thought, 'Oh my God, what if you had a judge on the Supreme Court who was in a coma? There's literally no mechanism in federal law and the Constitution to address that issue.' And I sat down and wrote the first scene."
Remarkably, the novel Abrams completed in late 2011 features a corrupt president, a deadly virus, and even a character conspicuously named Jared. Finding a publisher took nearly a decade. "No one wanted to buy it!" she says. "They thought the president seemed far-fetched, and that the Supreme Court was not that interesting of a subject." It was only in 2019, when a Hollywood producer asked if she was working on anything new, that she pulled the manuscript from a drawer and sold it. "It turns out back then I was far-fetched and now I'm prescient, so there you go."
Born in 1973, Abrams grew up "genteel poor"--as her mother phrased it--in Gulfport, Miss., as one of six kids. "I loved romance novels," she recalls of her youth. "I remember the first time I saw a Black woman on a book cover. It was revelatory. I also loved action and adventure. I would watch all the James Bond movies, and there was notably one Black person in those movies. And so for me, I wanted to write stories that were just as exciting, just as thought-provoking, but with people who looked like me."
When she was in high school, Abrams and her family moved to Atlanta so that her parents--a librarian and a shipyard worker--could study to become ministers. Abrams attended Spelman College, where her activist roots took hold. As a freshman, she burned the Georgia state flag, which had a Confederate emblem, on the capitol steps. (Yes, she had a permit.) She went on to earn degrees from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas and Yale Law School. She then worked as a tax attorney in the 2000s--while writing romance on the side--before entering politics.
Abrams served 11 years in the Georgia House of Representatives then ran for governor of Georgia in 2018, becoming the first Black woman to be a gubernatorial nominee of a major political party. After losing that election, which she says was marred by voter suppression on the part of state election officials, she founded Fair Fight, an organization that promotes fair elections, and took to the streets, helping to register hundreds of thousands of Georgia voters ahead of the 2020 presidential election. She was an instrumental figure in turning Georgia blue for Joe Biden and in helping two Democratic candidates win their Senate runoff elections there. "Victory is a great way to prove your point," she says. "I was incredibly happy."
For her monumental work on voting rights, Abrams has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. "I'm honored by the parliamentarian in Norway who thought so highly of me, but I find it incongruous," she says. "I'm deeply appreciative, but it's hard to reconcile that with the fact that I know me."
Abrams is modest, but her record and character speak for themselves. "Stacey is 100% who she seems to be," says her agent Linda Loewenthal. "She's a person of integrity and authenticity who's driven by a sense of mission and a cause greater than herself. And she's abundantly creative and a renaissance.person. I don't know when she sleeps."
Jason Kaufman, Abrams s editor, adds, "The amazing thing about Stacey is that she's a real force of nature politically, but she's also a top-tier thriller writer." He recalls working on edits with her in the heat of the 2020 election season. "I'd see Stacey doing an interview on television, talking about her strategy to personally get to all 159 counties in Georgia or something, and the next day she'd send me fantastic revisions of things we'd talked about, and nuanced plot points, and I'd think, 'How's she doing this?' But she's just a very focused person. It made my own sense of multitasking seem pretty inadequate."
Abrams has now added producer to her long list of credits. She reproduced the voting documentary All In: The Fight for Democracy, and her 2004 novel, Never Tell, about a killer roaming New Orleans, is in development at CBS, with more adaptations to come. "There's a lot of activity--Stacey's the real deal," says her film and television agent Jason Richman, who coheads the Media Rights Group at United Talent Agency.
"I never imagined While Justice Sleeps would see the light of day," Abrams says. "I'm excited to have others read about these characters that have lived in my head for so long." Her upcoming projects include another thriller and a children's book. As for her political future, she says, "What I thought was going to happen in 2018 didn't happen, and that created a new set of opportunities that I'm still figuring out."
Is she considering a presidential run? "Yes, but not now." She is clear on one thing: "My work in politics isn't done."
BY ELAINE SZEWCZYK
Elaine Szewczyk 's writing has appeared in McS weeney's and other publications. She's the author of the novel I'm with Stupid.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 PWxyz, LLC
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Szewczyk, Elaine. "Power Player: Voting rights activist, politician, and onetime romance author Stacey Abrams is on to something new with her first legal thriller." Publishers Weekly, vol. 268, no. 13, 29 Mar. 2021, pp. 57+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A657736797/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1b6ff0ba. Accessed 23 Jan. 2025.
Byline: As told to GILAD EDELMAN. PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRISTIAN CODY
An interview with STACEY ABRAMS
The former Democratic candidate for GEORGIA GOVERNOR and founder of the advocacy organization FAIR FIGHT talks democracy, voter suppression, and why speaking Klingon doesn't always help.
Democracy is not partisan. That's where I begin this conversation. Who I choose once I'm inside the voting booth is my business. Ensuring my ability to get inside is the responsibility of government. I'm a progressive Democrat in part because I want the system to be fair. We should not be guaranteed victory, but we should be guaranteed access. Anyone who believes in our democracy should hold that to be a good.
We're becoming more aware of the challenges that millions of Americans have long faced when it comes to voter suppression. The pandemic has exposed even more cracks in the process. Right now, the overarching challenge is that we have this discordant set of rules that allow each state to determine how safe or how dangerous voting should be. We need uniformity in how these rules apply, and that should happen at the federal level.
Many places have taken measures to expand mail-in voting since 2016, especially since the start of the pandemic. Unfortunately, for almost every state, the beta test was done during the presidential primaries-the largest platform possible other than a general election. In Washington, DC, and New York and Pennsylvania, which have not regularly had more than 5 to 10 percent of their voters cast a ballot by mail, they simply haven't scaled the new systems appropriately. That's due to a combination of incompetence, inexperience, and a lack of resources. We are in a crisis, and all of these communities are cash-strapped.
There is both incompetence and malice at play in voter suppression. Texas, for example, is still refusing to allow voter registration online. That is a failed policy. When technology, or the refusal to use technology, is designed to deny access, I believe it is wrong. That's my rubric. There is a narrow group of people, led by the president, who are afraid of increased voter participation. They are deeply worried that, as participation grows, their power will wane. And to them I say, I'm sorry, but that shouldn't undermine the legitimacy of access to the ballot.
If we can use technology to make the process easier, we want it. But as long as we do not have uniformity and safety and fairness in our process, we need to fall back on the analog. Paper and pen is the most easily audited form of voting. In Georgia we have these new machines that spit out your results. But the only way to audit them is to read a QR code. I'm not multilingual. I know a little bit of Klingon, but I can't read a QR code. So I have no way of verifying that what my ballot says on paper is what is being read into that computer. That lack of trust undermines my faith in the system, and unfortunately for millions of Georgians and millions of Americans, technology that does not come with trust is just as bad as someone outright stealing your election.
So often, people who have my personality type, my introversion, they shy away from this work. I tell a joke about the fact that-it's not a joke, it's true-when we used to have human contact and could knock on doors, I used to pray that no one would answer. I'm like, "God, please don't let them be at home, please don't let them be at home." And then they would open the door and I'd smile and I'd engage, but my heart would be beating fast. I don't like it. But I'm also very goal oriented, and my goal is to make certain that people in America have access to justice and opportunity. Just being in politics to be in politics is not my thing.
GILAD EDELMAN (@GiladEdelman) is WIRED' s politics writer, based in Washington, DC .
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
http://wiredmag.com
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Staff. "An Interview With Stacey Abrams." Wired, vol. 28, no. 10, Oct. 2020, p. 60. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A636330649/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=56d05823. Accessed 23 Jan. 2025.
OUR TIME IS NOW Power, Purpose,and the Fight for a Fair AmericaBy Stacey Abrams
In 2018, a black woman arrived at her polling place to cast her vote for Stacey Abrams in the Georgia gubernatorial race. When she arrived, she was refused a ballot because records showed that she had already voted absentee. Such snafus were rampant, and not just in the state of Georgia. Scores of voters were purged from the rolls and others were forced to wait in lines for hours. This woman was educated, prepared and determined to participate in the democratic process. Eventually the situation was sorted and the woman, Stacey Abrams, cast a historic vote for herself as the first black woman to represent a major political party as a gubernatorial candidate.
''Our Time Is Now'' is not a political memoir or a long-form resume; rather, it is a striking manifesto, a stirring indictment and a straightforward road map to victory. Abrams is not governor of Georgia, and she begins her speeches reminding audiences of this stinging matter of fact. Nevertheless, she considers her campaign to be a success. After all, ''winning doesn't always mean you get the prize.'' If the ''prize'' is the quantifiable electoral majority, the victory she embraces arose from her campaign's activation of the ''New American Majority -- that coalition of people of color, young people and moderate to progressive whites.''
Voters of color, the identifiable face of this new power bloc, were targeted on Election Day. Abrams painstakingly details the ''toolbox for effective disenfranchisement'' that includes such dirty tricks as the policy of ''exact match,'' which disqualifies voters because of small typographical inconsistencies between their registration card and state ID. (When explaining how newly married women were purged from the voter rolls because of hyphenated names, Abrams uses ''Tanisha Hagen-Thomas'' as a hypothetical, rather than, say, ''Jane Doe-Smith.'') Other tactics include closing of convenient polling places and rollbacks of early voting. The gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 declared open season on likely Democratic voters. These distressing facts are well known to most viewers of MSNBC and perhaps readers of this book.
[ Read an excerpt from ''Our Time Is Now.'' ]
Every good politician is a storyteller, and Abrams is a novelist with several titles under her belt. She portrays her constituents and their concerns in such a way that they feel more actual than symbolic, more individual than indicative. When she turns her gaze onto her family, her narrative gifts are in full flower. To illustrate the emotional and psychological effects of voter suppression, she draws a vivid, affectionate and insightful portrait of her grandparents, working-class Mississippians. In 1968, her grandmother was slated to vote for the first time, yet she was choked with fear of violent retribution. She whispered to her husband, ''I don't want to vote.''
[ This book was one of our most anticipated titles of June. See the full list . ]
The most profound and revelatory moment in ''Our Time Is Now'' is Abrams's unpacking of this incident, positioning her grandmother's paralysis as the ultimate goal of voter suppression. ''I don't want to vote'' is not the same as ''I don't want my voice heard'' or ''I have no stake in what laws are passed'' or ''I don't care who is elected.'' Some citizens, like her grandmother, are afraid. For many others there is a feeling that their vote will not change their lives because of a distrust of the voting system or a feeling that those in power are indifferent to them and their communities.
Just by virtue of their numbers, these ''unlikely voters'' have the potential to change the fate of America. Abrams believes politicians should court the population who form the backbone of the New American Majority -- and she uses her own 2018 campaign to demonstrate both the effectiveness of her strategies and the enormity of the obstacles erected by those who envision a ''monochromatic American identity'' comprising people with ''single-strand identities.'' She is confident in her ideas, yet she resists the formation of a cult of personality around herself. She shares her experience not to solicit laurels, but to start a movement. ''I'm a good candidate,'' she acknowledges, ''but my point is: Everyone running for office can try this at home.''
Reared in a household of engaged citizens -- the type pollsters call ''super voters'' because they participate in every single election -- Abrams takes as gospel that elections matter. When she learned that there would be no runoff for the Georgia race, she cycled through the stages of grief until she replaced ''acceptance'' with a phase of her own, ''plotting.'' She launched Fair Fight Action and Fair Fight PAC to combat voter suppression and Fair Count to address the matter of the census. ''Agitation is my favorite part of the political process,'' she says, and through these organizations, she hit the ground running.
The most basic distillation of Abrams's philosophy for political change is protest plus participation. Perhaps her unusual position as both a political insider and outsider is best captured in an anecdote shared early in ''Our Time Is Now.'' The year was 1992 and Abrams was a student at Spelman College. To protest the Confederate battle emblem, she burned the Georgia state flag on the steps of the Capitol. However, she followed the law and secured a permit first.
With refreshing transparency and candor, Stacey Abrams never conceals her ambition and dedication to transforming the system from within. As our democracy faces unprecedented peril, her time is now.
Tayari Jones is the author of ''An American Marriage.'' She is the Charles Howard Candler professor of English and creative writing at Emory University. The most basic distillation of Abrams's philosophy for political change is protest plus participation. OUR TIME IS NOW Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America By Stacey Abrams 304 pp. Henry Holt & Company. $27.
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PHOTO: Stacey Abrams PHOTOGRAPH BY KEVIN D. LILES FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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Jones, Tayari. "Try This at Home." The New York Times Book Review, 21 June 2020, p. 11(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A627159998/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=78dc3c06. Accessed 23 Jan. 2025.
Abrams, Stacey OUR TIME IS NOW Henry Holt (NonFiction None) $27.00 6, 9 ISBN: 978-1-250-25770-3
A detailed expose of how our democracy has been eroded—and a plan to fix it—from an up-and-coming national leader.
“My parents raised the six of us in Mississippi, my mother an underpaid librarian and my father a dyslexic shipyard worker,” writes Abrams, whose earliest memory of the voting process involved accompanying her parents to the polls. Her more recent memories are more bitter: In 2018, she lost the Georgia gubernatorial race to Brian Kemp in what she believes was an unfairly conducted election. “For a New American Majority—that coalition of people of color, young people, and moderate to progressive whites—to be successful, we have to stop letting them tell us who we are and how to succeed,” she writes. In succinct but thorough chapters, she lays out the grim history of voting rights, both in policy and practice, from the crafting of the Constitution to the present day. The devious creativity of the techniques used to suppress votes is jaw-dropping, and Abrams provides detailed examples from around the country. Among them are obstacles to registration, voter ID “exact match” policies and other restrictions, unexpected poll closings, restriction of early and absentee voting, ballot rejection, miscounting, manipulation of provisional ballots, gerrymandering, and a broken infrastructure, including malfunctioning machines and interminable lines. The author’s plan to solve the problem “short-circuits” debate about identity politics, and she clearly explains how to enact change at the federal level. The census, for example, can be “an organizing tool we can use to salvage democracy.” Abrams informs readers how “democracies rarely fail today because of military coups or foreign invasion. Instead their death is gradual, coming slowly and over time with an erosion of rights and an accumulation of attacks on the institutions that form their backbone.” An afterword on COVID-19 emphasizes the urgency of the 2020 election.
If you are feeling hopeless about politics, this well-informed blueprint for change may begin to restore your faith.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Abrams, Stacey: OUR TIME IS NOW." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2020. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A623603073/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f6b73864. Accessed 23 Jan. 2025.
Despite being the first black female nominee from a major party to run for governor of any state, Georgia's Stacey Abrams surely couldn't have anticipated that losing her election bid -- in controversial fashion to the Republican Brian Kemp -- would have catapulted her to the heights of the Democratic Party. Now she faces some temptingly plausible next steps, which could include, at least if you ask Charles Schumer, the Senate minority leader, an Abrams run for Senate. Joe Biden reportedly considered the 45-year-old as his running mate, an idea she quickly dismissed -- potentially in favor of something even bigger. (A decision she may have made by the time you read this.) ''If people I respect legitimately think this is something that could be so,'' Abrams said about the possibility of a challenge for the country's highest office, ''and it's not my mom and sister saying, 'You should do this,' then I owe those people the courtesy of thinking it through.''
I don't mean to be crass about it, but how much pressure is there for a politician like you to stay in the presidential-candidate conversation as a way of maintaining national relevance? I'll tell you my experience. I had a state race that was nationalized because of its historical dimensions.^1 I had an outcome that was important because of the implications it had not only for Georgia but for how we think about our democracy.^2 I was recruited to run for the Senate, which is an important job. At the same time, you had the zeitgeist surrounding the conversation about who should be in the mix for the presidency. It was important to me to not dismiss the calls for me to think about running, especially based on my race and gender and region, because the way I was being dismissed was largely driven by my profile.
I have a sense of what you mean when you talk about your profile, but could you unpack that for me? My initial thought was, and not to cast aspersions on Beto O'Rourke at all, but there's this notion that because Beto had done so well in his race for the Senate, he was considered a natural entrant into the presidential sweepstakes. Although I had an almost identical profile in terms of the campaign -- and also had fairly substantial legislative experience -- the same thought wasn't attributed to me. There are racial and gender implications to how we think about what leadership looks like in the country. So that was part of the initial conversation for me. In addition, I was approached by a number of organizations and donors. And so I thought it was important to say: ''Yes. This is a legitimate thought.'' Now, as I give very serious consideration to the idea of running, it comes back to what do I believe I could accomplish in that role.
Which is what? That goes to my core ethos, which is that poverty and inequality and inequity in our country are harming our future. And we need a leader who actually sees us all and is willing to lay out thoughtful progressive policies that will lift up the entire country and restore our international position.
So a couple of obligatory questions. Please.
Is running for the Senate still on the table? Absolutely. I am driven by a desire to see poverty end and economic security be a guaranteed capacity for every person. Most of the impediments or solutions are state driven, not federally driven. So shifting gears to think about the Senate was different. The Senate creates an extraordinary platform. While there is not the direct effect that you can have as governor, there is an opportunity to have conversations that are regional and national at the same time -- particularly the effect that a change in the Senate can have on the judiciary. Therefore my obligation has been to think through what that looks like. I do not believe in taking jobs just because the job is available. You have to want to do that job, and you should plan to be there for a while. Do I want to take a job where I could be somewhere for six, 12, 18 years?
And it's fair to say that your answer about when you'll know what your next political move is, whether it's running for president or the Senate, remains what you've said in the past: You'll know when you know? Yes.
Here's something that might sound fluffy but that I hope gets at something that isn't: You're part of a demographic -- women of color -- whose ambitions aren't always taken seriously enough. And I think part of what makes people excited about you is how forthright you are about your ambitions. So where does that self-confidence come from? Have you worked on it? Is it innate? Your diagnosis is correct, which is that communities that are not considered normative are often discouraged from not only having ambition, but they're also told that there is something inherently arrogant in wanting more and that we should be satisfied with whatever we get. I've long ignored those denials. I do so in part because I was raised by parents^3 who encouraged us to dream big, and they always grounded it in, ''If you're going to dream big, be ready to back it up.'' My life has always been about making certain I accrue the skills necessary to make my ambitions real.
Making those ambitions real -- expressing them -- is sometimes the hardest part. There was always reticence about saying my ambitions aloud lest I be somehow dismissed. We've been taught -- communities of color, certainly black women -- to practice self-effacement as opposed to practicing humility. Then we question why there hasn't been progress made. In part it's because if we say we want more, there's immediately a reaction -- in 2017, when Cosmo reported that I said, ''Yes, I would like to one day be president of the United States,'' the larger narrative was that there was something inelegant and actually wrongheaded about airing that ambition.
Do you have self-doubt about anything? I don't characterize it as self-doubt. I characterize it as evaluation. You should always give thought to what you want and why you want it, and that's why for me having an unusually public rumination has been a bit discomfiting. These are important jobs. It's not that I doubt my capacity, but I need to make certain I'm doing it for the right reasons. Yes, I believe I could win a Senate election. I'm determined. I'm a very good campaigner. But the question is: Do I want to do the work of being a senator in the way that I think it should be done? And am I the best person? The answers may be no. But knowing that is not a function of doubt or confidence. It's a function of: Is this the most effective role for me to play? And: Does it help me do the work that I think needs to be done?
What about self-doubt outside politics? Dating has been this sort of glaring issue.
Welcome to the world. Exactly. I've jokingly said I wasn't good at dating so I stopped doing it. I regret that I allowed self-doubt in that one area to color how I approached an entire facet of my life. I'm working to remedy that, but it's taken some time for me to get there. So yes, I am capable of self-doubt. It's usually not in the professional space, but in the romantic-relationship space.
Is there any part of you that wants to just take time off and write another novel?^4 I would love to, but right now what's calling me -- and what this moment demands -- is that I figure out how I can be most effective in preserving and advancing our democracy and challenging the policies and the politics that are continuing to exacerbate poverty.
People have talked about your campaign for governor of Georgia as innovative because your strategy was based on the realization that the state's demographics aren't as white as they used to be, and therefore the real Democratic gains could come from finding new voters of color rather than trying to win more white voters. Did some people see it that way because they were stuck in a paradigm in which white voters are always the center of everything? Yes. White voters are normative because they are the largest voting bloc, and political math says you try to attract people who've already voted before because they are the easiest to get and they've demonstrated a willingness to vote. People have three choices: They can vote for your person, they can vote for the other person or they can not vote. The standard, traditional political trope has been that those who make that third choice aren't worth the effort or the investment. Our innovation was that they could count, and we saw there were a lot of folks who simply wanted someone to invest in them.
Given how well you did in that election with increasing turnout, what factors explain your opponent, Brian Kemp, doing as well as he did and winning? Georgia's a very divided state. In the South, and in Georgia in particular, race is the strongest predictor of political leanings.^5 The white population is still largely Republican, and the communities of color are largely Democratic-leaning. That means you have a divided politics. I've never denied that. The issue is, are all of the people speaking up? That has not been so in Georgia. In the 2014 election cycle, 1.1 million Democrats showed up. In my cycle, 1.9 million. That addition of 800,000 voters is emblematic of who wasn't speaking up before. But what we call attention to are the 1.4 million-plus who were purged and the 53,000 who weren't processed and the thousands who were given provisional ballots. I do not believe that Georgia has made this dramatic transition to a space where we no longer have conservatives in the state. My point is that I believe we have reached a place where those who share my values actually outnumber those who share the values of my opponent. And that wasn't made manifest because of his structural racism and how he diminished people's ability to vote.
I saw that recently you said something like you'd won your election but you just didn't get to have the job. Yes.
Is there any fear on your part that using that kind of language fans the same flames that President Trump has fanned about delegitimizing our elections? I see those as very different. Trump is alleging voter fraud, which suggests that people were trying to vote more than once. Trump offers no empirical evidence to meet his claims. I make my claims based on empirical evidence, on a demonstrated pattern of behavior that began with the fact that the person I was dealing with was running the election. If you look at my immediate reaction after the election, I refused to concede.^6 It was largely because I could not prove what had happened, but I knew from the calls that we got that something happened. Now, I cannot say that everybody who tried to cast a ballot would've voted for me, but if you look at the totality of the information, it is sufficient to demonstrate that so many people were disenfranchised and disengaged by the very act of the person who won the election that I feel comfortable now saying, ''I won.'' My larger point is, look, I won because we transformed the electorate, we turned out people who had never voted, we outmatched every Democrat in Georgia history. But voter suppression is endemic, and it's having a corrosive effect. If we do not resolve this problem, it will harm us all.
It's one thing to say you lost that election unfairly, and it's another to say you won because you increased voter turnout. But can you clarify for me exactly what you're implying when you say you ''won'' that election? There are three things: No. 1, I legally acknowledge that Brian Kemp secured a sufficient number of votes under our existing system to become the governor of Georgia. I do not concede that the process was proper, nor do I condone that process. No. 2, I believe we won in that we transformed the electorate and achieved a dramatic increase in turnout. It was a systemic and, I think, sustainable change in the composition of the electorate and in the transformation of the narrative about Georgia and Georgia politics. Three, I have no empirical evidence that I would have achieved a higher number of votes. However, I have sufficient and I think legally sufficient doubt about the process to say that it was not a fair election.
Are the national Democractic Party -- and the donor class -- giving enough importance to voting rights as a central issue? They are doing more than they've ever done before. We've seen 20, 25 years of voter suppression taking shape and 24 months of fighting back. That's not the ratio we need. There's always more to be done, and as I meet with people who are declared candidates for president, one of the questions I ask is: ''What are you going to do about voter suppression?''
Which of those candidates gave the most encouraging answer? I'm not going to answer that. I will say this: I am pleased that everyone I've spoken to has agreed that this is an important issue.
Is it a problem right now for Democratic presidential candidates to feel that they have to try and appease the party's various ideological factions? I don't see any massive distinction between the process Democrats are going through now and the one that we saw play out in the Republican Party in 2016. We just happen to be the ones going through it in public because we have primaries to run. If you asked every single Democratic candidate, ''Do you believe in criminal-justice reform?'' the answer is yes. The question then becomes: What does that look like? There are some key ideological differences between folks in the Democratic apparatus, but that's part of politics. I mean, I don't think Bernie Sanders and John Hickenlooper share a common belief about our economic system.
Does socialism make sense to you as a response to the state of our economic system? I'm a capitalist. I believe in our capital markets. I believe they need to be heavily regulated. I believe that avarice when left to its own devices is corrosive and that it will always outweigh conscience in our marketplace. And I think if you talk to business owners like myself, they will tell you they believe in regulation. It's a question of: Do the regulations make sense? I would argue that what is often cast as contrast is really a question of delivery system. I believe, for example, that health care is a right and not a privilege. But I believe in the private marketplace and that it should exist for the delivery of health care. I don't see that as in conflict with the idea of having access to Medicare for all who would like to buy into that system.
With health care, there are polls suggesting that a majority of people want some kind of reform. Why aren't we as a country driven more by instances like that, where there's broad agreement, instead of fixating on what we disagree about politically? It is endemic to humanity that we take the common for granted and fight about the rest. This isn't new. If you think through most of our national tensions, with the very notable exception of slavery, by and large our conversations have been about how we live out what we think to be our common goals. No one says they don't want the American dream. The argument is how do we get there.
So for any issue that has wide public support^7 -- stronger privacy protections are another one -- why isn't anyone passing what would presumably be popular legislation? There's a big difference between what the people want and what the leaders want. Think about the difference between what becomes politically palatable when it's played out 24-7 on cable news and what's politically palatable when you and I are having a conversation. I often could sit with a colleague from the other side of the aisle^8 and come to common cause on an issue, but the fact that he was agreeing with me meant that he was going to have to answer to his constituents about why he agreed with a Democrat. The demonization of who's offering an idea has made it harder for ideas to get traction.
Is that an irreconcilable problem? We have to restore the incentives for getting past the demonization. There was a through-line from the elimination of earmarks^9 to the deep polarization of our politics that has created this stasis. When you have earmarks, you have to work with other people because you can't get what you wanted unless they get something they want. When there's no reason to compromise and every reason to demonize, then people are going to go with demonization. In politics the public is supposed to do your job review, and your job review right now depends on how loyal you are to what have been artificially set as your standards.
When you talk about people's standards being set artificially -- don't people have agency for their own political beliefs? That's the danger of the polarization of our media. When our media was common, there was more common cause. Right now the architecture of our political space has voices telling you what you want because they're also a filter of what you know. When you filter your news, it creates an artificial environment that suggests that there is some war of values that is often belied the minute you talk to people. Very few people actually experience the relationship of sitting in a committee hearing and having the conversation and realizing, especially on the state level, we agree 90 percent of the time. It's the 10 percent where we are diametrically opposed -- sometimes for good reason -- that gets played up.
As far as you can tell, are there reasons beyond misogyny and racism that explain the conservative media's obsession with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar? I think it's the confluence of those two things, but it's also the virality of their effectiveness. Alexandria doesn't sound that different than Bernie Sanders, but what is different is that she is representative in both race and gender of a very specific way of talking about her opinions, and a community that is paying attention. The same thing is true for Representative Omar. They're not the first of their kind, but they are incredibly capable of garnering attention in a time when the Republican Party recognizes that its hegemony is teetering. And let's be clear, going back to the question of how women of color are seen, this is not endemic solely to the Republican Party. The doubts of my capacity have come not only from the right; they've come from the left as well.
You talked earlier about structural inequality, which calls to mind the subject of reparations. Do you see a credible political path to making it a reality? I do. I think that reparations make sense. We need to determine what that looks like. Because we've refused to have the conversation about it, we've never been able to get to the analysis and therefore the prescription. But we have to acknowledge that in the United States of America it wasn't simply that we didn't like a certain group, we've built -- no. Not we, they. The government built systems designed to exclude and to diminish the capacity of communities to participate in their own economic survival. Reparations are a necessary conversation for two groups: African-Americans and Native Americans. Those are the groups that by law had been stripped of their autonomy and their participation in our society. And I think there's a credible path because people are talking about it.
Are there subjects you wish you were asked more about? I wish people would ask me about my policy interests.
What's one policy idea you're excited about? I love tax policy.^10 We often think about it only in terms of rates and not structure. The structure of our tax policy in the United States is the most direct form of social engineering that we have and the least investigated. Our tax policy is designed to benefit those at a certain point in American wealth production and disadvantages those most responsible for the daily generation of our economy. I want us to have a vibrant national conversation about this. I don't know if anybody else would want to have it with me.
At the risk of now losing a bunch of readers, tell me more about tax structure. We have a tax structure that inherently and disproportionately is supportive of business, of corporations and of the wealthiest. And it is disproportionately deleterious to the workers, to individual taxpayers. That is why we have a structural imbalance where we have corporations worth billions of dollars that pay no corporate income taxes, and families that are being assailed for accessing the earned-income tax credit, which moves them out of poverty to just above the poverty level. That structural inequity is what we should be concerned about.
Do you have an idea for a next book? I've got three books that are sort of in media res. I've got a teenage superhero novel where a 15-year-old can manipulate memory. I have a middle-school fantasy novel that I want to finish before my nieces and nephews actually reach middle school. Then I have a legal thriller that I have finished -- I need to go back and edit it -- that is based on the premise: What if a Supreme Court justice who has the swing vote on the court falls into a persistent vegetative state? The Constitution does not actually address that issue.
Here's an important issue for you to address: Have you reconsidered what is, frankly, your troublingly low opinion of ''Star Trek: Deep Space Nine''?^11 It was not a low opinion! Look, I've never, ever, ever disparaged ''Deep Space Nine.'' I liked ''Deep Space Nine.'' I just don't put it as high up because that was more of a military drama than it was about a journey. I was a physics major for a while. I read about M-theory for fun.^12 Those are the things that are the most exciting to me. Therefore, if given a hierarchy, I'm always going to put those ''Trek''s that do more travel at the top of my list. But I absolutely liked ''Deep Space Nine.'' Now please tell that to every person who's started to hate me on the internet because of that!
Photograph by Mamadi Doumbouya
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity from two conversations.
This is a more complete version of the story than the one that appeared in print.
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PHOTOS: PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH BY MAMADI DOUMBOUYA) (MM16); PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH FROM STACEY ABRAMS.) (MM18); PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH BY JESSICA MCGOWAN/GETTY IMAGES.) (MM19)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 The New York Times Company
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Marchese, David. "Why Stacey Abrams Is Still Saying She Won." The New York Times Magazine, 5 May 2019, p. 16(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A584364401/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fd8d9b6b. Accessed 23 Jan. 2025.
A symptotic. This is the word Stacey Ahrams chooses to describe her phenomenal rise as an overachieving black woman from a "genteel poor" family in the Deep South. For someone who had considered physics as a major, it is a term that perfectly captures how the Georgia governorship and other major accomplishments (she was a finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship too) have, despite valiant effort and a singularly impressive resume, eluded her. "I call it my asymptote of success," she tells me, while I wonder what such a word could possibly mean. "An asymptote," she explains as if she were the coolest college professor ever, "is a curve that comes close to the line. It's infinitesimally close but never actually crosses the line. That's sometimes how I feel my life has gone--that I come incredibly close to these things, but that barrier has yet to be crossed. I have understood for a long time that my trajectory was always going to be asymptotic, but my mission is to break the plane."
The scientific way that Abrams, 45, parses her life's path is indicative of how she ran the governor's race. By all measures, the former Georgia House minority leader's run for the Georgia governorship as the first African American female nominee by a major party was historic. More than 1.2 million African Americans voted in the race, exceeding the total number of Democratic Georgia voters in 2014. Abrams got more votes than Barack Obama (who campaigned for Abrams, as did Oprah Winfrey) and Hillary Clinton did during their respective presidential campaigns in the Peach State. Even more impressive is that she received this number of votes in a midterm-election year. Her campaign tripled voter turnout among Latino and Asian American voters. White voters supported Abrams more than any recent candidate in history. And she received more votes from white women than Hillary Clinton did. But in the end, the official result: Republican opponent Brian Kemp had 1,978,408 votes (50.2 percent) and Abrams had 1,923,685 (48.8 percent)--a difference of 54,723 votes. (No majority would have triggered a runoff.)
Abrams tells me with no hesitance, "If we had a fair fight, we'd have won that election." It is a fact we can never truly know.
But the numbers don't tell the full story. A serial trailblazer, Abrams is no mere politician. She is a political operative, trying to build the kind of political shop that can change southern politics, and therefore national politics, for generations to come. Too often, black women's political genius hides in plain view. To overlook Abrams's calculated political strategy is to miss--or ignore--that she is playing a very long game. She launched the New Georgia Project in 2013, submitting over 200,000 voter registrations in five years. She started the Blue Institute in 2015 to train a whole new class of black and Latino political operatives who would have the qualifications to run progressive campaigns such as hers throughout the country, focusing on southern states.
Abrams did not concede victory to Kemp. She did give an "acknowledgement" speech, recognizing that he would be sworn in as Georgia's next governor. But she has already set her sights on a larger fight: ensuring access to fair elections in Georgia through her Fair Fight Action campaign. And certainly she has pledged to run for office again. But first, she has to get her voice back.
The morning after the November 6 election, Abrams slept late, watched Sorry to Bother You, an African American sci-fi comedy with dark overtones--"It was the wrong movie to watch," she says, laughing--then got on the phone to secure additional donations for the battle ahead. After spending the rest of the day strategizing how exactly they would force the state of Georgia to count every vote, including provisional and absentee ballots, Abrams woke up on the 8th with acute viral pharyngitis (inflammation of the pharynx). That the grueling pace of the election coupled with the controversial returns had physically robbed Abrams of her actual voice is about as on the nose a metaphor as you can get for the ways the election worked to politically rob her supporters of their collective voice. Over the next four days, as she struggled to recover, her team fought, at her behest and direction, for a full tally of Georgia's votes. "But," she says, "we knew the numbers were gonna be hard. He [Kemp] was an effective voter suppressor. What he had done over the course of 10 years we were not going to undo in 10 days."
The sheer volume of stories and the levels of election chicanery are staggering. On election morning, Candi Dugas, a poll watcher in Atlanta, saw an older woman turned away from the polls. "They said she had already cast her ballot at a precinct that was too far away for her to have gone and then come to where we were," Dugas says. Because the system had incorrectly marked that she had cast a ballot, "there was nothing they could do." The woman left. Valerie Thomas, an Atlanta educator, was on heightened alert after receiving notification that she might be purged from Georgia's voter rolls. Kemp put on hold the registrations of 53,000 voters--70 percent of whom are African American, according to an Associated Press report--based on a dubious 2017 law about signatures needing to be an "exact match." (Kemp, who over his years as secretary of state, from 2010 to 2018, had been accused of voter suppression and sued by advocacy groups including the ACLU and the Georgia NAACP, said they were all eligible to vote on Election Day. He's denied all allegations.) Thomas chose to vote early. In addition to long lines--four to five hours in many precincts--and low numbers of voting machines, the fewest she'd ever seen in her polling location, there were only three poll workers. When she finally made it into the booth, "the voting machine kept skipping," she told me. "I kept having to hit it. When I went to the last screen to check, two of the candidates weren't the candidates that I chose." Georgia voter Donna Troka mailed in an absentee ballot weeks before the election. "As I got closer and closer to that date," she recalls, "I started to panic because it wasn't showing up as received" on the secretary of state's website. Troka went to her local precinct to vote and was told her absentee ballot had been received. She simply had to trust the woman who told her that her vote would be counted.
Cazembe Murphy Jackson, an activist in Atlanta, had been part of several community efforts to get out the vote. When he went to cast his ballot, his name was not on the list. Unsure of how provisional ballots worked, he refused the one offered to him. (Provisional ballots record votes when a voter's eligibility is in question. The Abrams campaign had to fight to ensure these ballots were counted.) After driving 30 minutes across town, Jackson was able to vote, but he told me, "Thankfully, we had a car. I have a job that's flexible and cares about civic engagement enough that they wouldn't care about me having to take off."
More than 40,000 Georgians called a voter-protection hotline on Election Day and for 10 days after to report rampant election irregularities. Those complaints are the basis of the massive federal lawsuit filed by Fair Fight Action in late November. Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of Fair Fight Action and former manager for the Abrams campaign, says, "We filed the suit alleging constitutional violations of the right to vote in Georgia and that there was disparate and disproportionate impact on African Americans and voters of color. We're asking for full reform of the system." This includes everything from addressing the use of "old, shoddy voting machines, to accepted use of provisional ballots, to the exact-match and registration issues, to local election officials' training." Abrams hopes that it will become part of the record of cases that compels the country to reinstitute the enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, parts of which were overturned by the Supreme Court in 2013. "We have to remember the point of elections is to make policy," she continues. "It is centered right now on voting rights, but those voting rights are directly tied to whether you have access to health care, Medicaid expansion, reproductive health. We are hoping that because of court decisions, the state legislature will decide to do things better." As Fair Fight wends its way through federal courts, Groh-Wargo imagines that the state of Georgia's "tactic will be to delay and not deal with this miscarriage of justice. We expect this to be a big fight." Fair Fight's stance will be "unrelenting," she adds.
"Failure isn't fatal," Abrams tells me of her nonvictory in the governor's race. But given the injustices faced by both Abrams and her voters, she has the right to some grief. When she had time to reflect on that 10-day period between Election Day and Non-Concession Day, she told her sister Jeanine, "You sat shiva with me for 10 days." (Shiva is a Jewish ritual period of mourning for a loved one.) The daughter of Methodist ministers, Abrams demonstrates a willingness to draw sustenance from a range of spiritual traditions--just one more way that she shatters stereotypes of southern politicians as parochial and conservative. "It was 10 days of mourning, 10 days of anger at the gods, 10 days of grief, 10 days of righteous indignation." But she refused to allow her grief, anger, and indignation to overtake her. "Part of my makeup as a black woman is, yes, you experience those things, and then you get up and do the next thing because what choice do you have?" She felt she had to get back to work because "your obligation is larger than your personal grief; it's larger than your personal anger."
Being unflappable is required of women in politics. For black women, that requirement rises to the level of being preternaturally strong. Stacey saw her mother, Rev. Carolyn Abrams, perfect this lesson, overcoming sexism and racism as a female minister in the church. When Reverend Abrams asked her daughter whether she had "counted the costs of running for governor," Stacey repeated her mother's oft-spoken words: "Someone has to be first."
Reverend Abrams knew early on that her daughter would make a difference in the world and recounts a story of a 12-year-old Stacey as a Girl Scout when the family lived in Mississippi. "Stacey was the only black scout to represent her district. They went to Arizona for a national meeting. We took her to the airport to meet the group, and when we got there, the rest of the people had left and had not told us there was a change in plans. Stacey, who had never flown before, asked if she could go anyway. She found out there was another plane shortly that she could take. My husband and I were reluctant to let her go, but she was determined because she had won the right to represent. So Stacey flew across the country to a scout meeting that I believe had been conveniently arranged so that she would not be there. She made it to that meeting, and she represented Mississippi."
Strength is admirable, but it can also make you seem impenetrable and unable to connect. Abrams manages, however, to be both erudite and endearing. Bettina Love and her family were Abrams's neighbors in Atlanta's Kirkwood neighborhood for almost four years, during which time Abrams would sometimes bring in their trash cans or give their children a civics lesson if they asked about government. Love tells me about a time when she ran into Abrams, who was by that time in need of a security detail because she was running for office. Abrams offered to babysit her children. "She never changed. She is a politician, but she doesn't feel like a politician," Love says. On another occasion, Love attended an Abrams event at a local barbershop. One man was "agitated about small businesses and what she was going to do to help. By the time she gave her answer, you could see his whole body ease," Love recalls. "He was good with her answer, and his body wasn't tense anymore."
That ability to neutralize and disarm her critics is one of Abrams's superpowers. Abrams sees this skill in far more pragmatic terms. "I know what I believe and why I believe it. My job is to understand what you believe and why you believe it. If you do that with authenticity, you create space for conversation."
"In most instances," says Representative Carolyn Hugley, the House minority whip during Abrams's tenure as minority leader, "Stacey is the smartest person in the room." But in addition to this, Abrams "is the kind of person who is genuinely interested in everyone's ideas." That characterization of Abrams is one I heard over and over again from Abrams's supporters and members of her team. Ann Wilson Cramer, one of Abrams's mentors since her days at Spelman College, says similarly, "She is always that rare blend of the smartest person in the room but with a heart that respects the other."
Smart women who know they're smart and dare let other people know it too are often deeply unliked in American politics. Ask Hillary Clinton. Ask Elizabeth Warren. Wonkishness is not a selling point if you're a woman. And charisma is usually seen as the province of men. Somehow, Abrams manages to be wonkish, bookish, nerdy, and "sturdy" (her adjective to describe being plus-size) and yet still be charming and beloved. Perhaps the soft southern drawl, a product of her Mississippi roots, makes her feel familiar and accessible. Perhaps it is because she is both tough and tender.
She'll need to be all these things and more to keep people engaged after a hard-fought battle and a heartbreaking result. As Kimberle Crenshaw, a professor at UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School who has written about black feminist legal theory, racism, and the law, has argued, the problem is not just one of voter suppression but of "voter depression." I asked Carol Anderson, Atlanta resident, historian, and author of One Person, No Vote, whether voter suppression would kill morale. She had heard strains of it in the aftermath of the election and so much effort: "We did all that, and she still didn't win."
That Georgia is a 21st-century "ground zero" (as it was in the 20th century as one of the earliest Southern states to win the battle for black voting rights, in 1946) for the fight to secure voting rights brings to mind not only Abrams's language of the asymptote but also Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s oft-quoted observation that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Long moral arcs and asymptotic trajectories make for poetic speeches, but they are cold comfort to voters who have high expectations of progressive politics in the present Trump moment. Still, Anderson, who spent Election Day driving seniors to the polls, feels optimistic about the fight ahead. "There was a deflation after the civil-rights movement," she says. "That is because it got pitched as winning the Super Bowl and not just getting a first down. When you get a perspective about what the struggle is, that first down keeps you on the field fighting." Marie Claire contributing editor Alicia Garza, a strategy and partnerships director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, shares Anderson's enthusiasm. Black women from eight different countries, all Georgia domestic workers, did outreach on behalf of the organization's political-action arm, Care in Action, and were Abrams's biggest canvassing team. "She really cared about the experiences of black domestic workers in Georgia," Garza says. "She had a vision for how to improve their lives."
Abrams's team hopes the PAC arm of Fair Fight, which ran ads encouraging voters to sign up for the Affordable Care Act and to support fair elections, can also keep voters engaged. An added benefit of keeping her constituents informed about policy matters relevant to them is that she will remain on the minds of her supporters. "Part of the mission of Fair Fight and the reason we are connecting votes to issues is that we want people to remain animated," Abrams says. "There will be some attrition. There will be people for whom this was their one attempt and the perfidy of the other side is so egregious as to tell them they shouldn't try again. My mission is to make that the smallest cohort possible, and that's why my speech on November 16 was so important to me. If I had said that what they did was right, then it reaffirms every cynicism that they have. By saying it was wrong, you create space for people to understand. If this is a game, you're not going to let the ref come back. You're not going to let the person who deflated the ball do it again. Let's remind them not just about why they voted for me but why they voted at all." In his response, Kemp did not acknowledge voter-suppression claims in her speech, saying Georgians were ready to move forward.
Abrams's parents raised their children to believe they had responsibility--not to win, but to fight. And she has made clear that her fight includes running for office again. She recently joined the board of directors at liberal think tank the Center for American Progress and launched a thank-you tour through Georgia. She was chosen to issue the Democratic response to the State of the Union address in February. In it, she issued a vehement rebuke to the voter suppression that stymied her in Georgia: "The foundation of our moral leadership around the globe is free and fair elections, where voters pick their leaders, not where politicians pick their voters." She also affirmed the importance of "reproductive justice," a term invented by black feminist activists that centers on not just the right to abortion but also the right to good health care and advocacy at every stage of parenting. And she shouted out both unions and the domestic workers who had been so pivotal to her run for the governorship, signaling that if she were to run again, she would have policies to support the working class.
Her speech was so well-received--politicians and pundits from Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi to former senior adviser to President Barack Obama Dan Pfeiffer and MSNBC's Joy Reid showered praise--the calls for her to seek public office grew ever louder. She has not yet decided on whether she will run for governor, the Senate, or even the presidency. However, she has met with Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) about a possible 2020 U.S. Senate run against Republican David Perdue. Her State of the Union response and her feat of nearly turning Georgia blue has opened a wide field of possibilities for her. And of a possible 2022 rematch for Georgia governor, she says, "Next time, I'm gonna take it if that's what I run for. But the next thing I go for, I've gotten closer [to Georgia governor] than anyone else, and there's a joy in that."
BY BRITTNEY COOPER
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Reprinted with permission of Hearst.
http://www.hearst.com
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Cooper, Brittney. "STACEY ABRAMS IS JUST GETTING STARTED." Marie Claire, vol. 26, no. 4, Apr. 2019, pp. 134+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A581732472/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a721da67. Accessed 23 Jan. 2025.
Minority Leader: How to Lead from the Outside and Make Real Change.
By Stacey Abrams.
Apr. 2018. 256p. Holt, $27 (9781250191298). 320.
After Georgia state legislator Abrams writes about graduating magna cum laude from at Spelman College; attending Yale Law School and becoming a tax attorney at a private firm; serving as consultant to nonprofits while starting a handful of her own, including one that registered hundreds of thousands of new voters in the state; and writing romance-suspense novels, she had the nerve to say that what she really wanted to be was a singer. And who knows, she may still find a way to fit that in, after her current run for governor of Georgia, which would make her the first African American woman to hold that office. Although there are many books on networking and achieving political and entrepreneurial success, Abrams' is geared toward helping those who are on the fringes, especially African American women, find pathways to success and power. With chapters such as "Fear and Otherness," "Prepare to Win and Embrace the Fail," and "Making What You Have Work," this is an excellent guide that addresses setbacks and pitfalls and identifies strategies to overcome them.--Valerie Hawkins
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
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Hawkins, Valerie. "Minority Leader: How to Lead from the Outside and Make Real Change." Booklist, vol. 114, no. 16, 15 Apr. 2018, p. 5. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A537267979/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0247a4ea. Accessed 23 Jan. 2025.