The 2019 RITA® Award winners!

First of all, there aren’t 3 round of judges. There are two–a preliminary round and a final round. I clearly stated that in my comment, but you were likely too busy getting vehement to read what I said.

Also, Kennedy Ryan is the first African-American author to win a RITA; she is not the first author of color. Tess Gerritsen, who is Asian, won for Romantic Suspense in 2001; Caridad Ferrer won in 2007. Still a very sad number.

That said, I was specifically addressing an even playing field between popular and less-known authors, which I believe the contest delivers as much as is possible. I almost noted that any contest will still be affected by the whims and prejudices of the judges, as is any contest judged by human beings. (Hell, Dimon’s statement on the RWA website even says, “one point every Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) expert we consulted made was this: inherent bias is everywhere and in every contest.”) If you really wanted to call out the contest, you might have noted that the first African-American author to win a RITA did so…by writing white characters. As far as I can tell, a romance with Black characters, or Asian characters–Gerritsen’s protagonists were white–has yet to win.) It’s a twofold problem–there are substantially more romances by white authors and/or with white characters published every year than romances by authors of color, so the odds are already in their favor; plus, RWA as an organization is overwhelmingly white and straight, which means most of the judges will be too. But in terms of every book being given the chance to be entered and judged along with every other book in the contest, I think it offers as much of an even playing field as possible.

As for the Nazi romance, that was disgusting, but I don’t see how that was an issue of an uneven playing field. That’s an issue of a self-selecting audience. As I understand it, the Inspirational romance category usually has a hard time finding judges (the judges volunteer for the categories they want to read, presumably to ensure the books are read by people who are knowledgable about that subgenre and who like it, because I doubt either the authors or the judges would be happy to have people who are predisposed to dislike them forced to read the books). The people who volunteer to judge it are more likely to be white Christians who share that author’s worldview and are oblivious to the issues the same way she was. (And given that this discussion began with someone using the number of reviews to determine what should be a winner–the Nazi romance has 262 5-star reviews on Amazon; looking at the negative reviews, they only started appearing in mid-2015, once the Rita scandal broke. Clearly there are a lot of people who are the audience for that book who don’t get why it’s problematic–and those are the ones likely to be judging it in a contest.)

My own most hated example of a Rita finalist is Bowen and Kennedy’s HIM, a M/M romance that is a particularly offensive example of straight women fetishizing the lives of gay men to get their rocks off, oblivious to the homophobia in the text. That book didn’t just final–it won the award, but other than one review at Smart Bitches, I didn’t see anyone calling it out or being disgusted by the win. But I can accept that, for an award primarily judged by straight women, plenty of them wouldn’t see the same issues that I do, and still believe the award offers as much of an even playing field between popular and unheralded authors as anything can.

Wait, which Nazi romance pulled down a RITA nomination?

Two more corrections–I finally remembered that Sherry Thomas, who is Asian, has won two Ritas (by writing white characters). Also, Smart Bitches just mentioned The Moon in the Palace by Weina Dai Randel as one of its deals of the day. It won a Rita in the Mainstream Fiction category; both the author and the heroine are Chinese, though it’s not a romance novel. Just to give those authors their due.

For the anon who asked about the Nazi book, it’s For Such a Time by Kate Breslin, the story of a Jewish woman in WWII who falls in love with a Nazi officer. She redeems him (or some such nonsense) and also converts to Christianity in the end. If you do a Google search, plenty of articles about the outrage surrounding it being named a finalist that year should come up.