Today the Smart Bitches posted a blog about the Reference and User Services Quarterly’s Romance 101 Core Collection. The article gives an excellent definition of romance and divides them into five categories: historical, Regency, contemporary, paranormal, and suspense. Each librarian writes an intro to her chosen category before listing 5 titles that should be in every romance collection.

African-American romance gets a mention:

Loosely defined as a romance set after World War II, contemporary romances often incorporate many of the aspects of other romance subgenres, such as African-American, paranormal, and suspense, and other genres, such as chick-lit, women’s fiction, and urban fiction.

And

African-American writers and characters also have an adaptive home in contemporary romance today, as do inspirational romance writers and their fans.

Unfortunately, no African-American romances made the list. I’m not really surprised by that. No category romances are listed in contemporary, and there aren’t any inspirationals either. However, they do mention author’s names in these other unrepresented categories. So why aren’t African-American romance authors named?

It’s entirely possible that these ladies haven’t read enough AA romance to make a determination on who’s the best and brightest of the genre. If not, I’d like to suggest a list of them to share. Maybe they can do a follow up article next month. There’s an email address on the article that I linked to (I’m not cool on publishing folk’s email addys without permission) if you’d like to email her directly.

But let’s blog about this and get the conversation started. Who do you think should go on an African-American Romance 101 list?

(I’m on vacation until Tuesday, but I’ll be sure to respond when I return!)