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Notes on the Ritas

What are the Rita Awards?

The purpose of the RITA award is to promote excellence in the romance genre by recognizing outstanding published romance novels and novellas.

The award itself is a golden statuette named after RWA's first president, Rita Clay Estrada, and has become the symbol for excellence in published romance fiction.

They are the Oscars of Romance taking place this year in Denver on July 19t  h Up to 2,000 romance novels are entered in the RITA competition. A novel may be entered either by the author or by the book's publisher in one of the contest categories. After the first round of judging by published romance authors, entries that meet the qualifications to become a finalist then advance to the final round.

Once RWA announces the RITA finalists, a final round of judges evaluates and scores these novels to determine the RITA Award winners. The RITA Award winners are announced at a black tie awards ceremony at the RWA Annual Conference.

What’s great about winning?

It’s a big deal to win—it gets you seen, it gets you attention, and you get to put the blurb on your book that it won, and that’s a big deal when so much of this industry and so much of this genre is word of mouth.

Finalist were announced a few weeks ago and there was a big controversy—but the mistake would be thinking that this controversy is limited to just this year—

The controversy

It’s basically a Rita’s so white—like the Oscars or really any legacy award ceremony the Rita’s have been and continue you to be a place where Authors of Color get short shrift.

It’s also a confluence of things too, right—there were more self published titles this year than there have been, but it can be expensive to be considered, and if you don’t have a publisher to push or pay for you that can be a limiting factor. So that adds another element to the bad exclusivity of the Ritas—

One of the other limiting factors from my understanding is that the chapters themselves can be and have historically been really hostile to the concerns and discussion brought forward by authors of color.

The media coverage:

Twitter has been really active in cataloging and keeping track of why this is such a problem, many authors came out to share their own horror stories of exclusion or professional marginalization, Beverly Jenkins and Courtney Milan both had very powerful threads describing particular RWA awards ceremonies over the years. And frankly cataloged a list of grievances and Romancelandia had this conversation with itself.

The Ripped Bodice has been producing The State of Racial Diversity In Romance Publishing Report for the last four years (we’ll link to it) and then spent the day tweeting at publishers with things like ‘you only have one book by an author of color to come out in the last year is that okay with you’ And only two publishing houses got back to them that day. It’s not great

One author after reading and hearing these stories suggested that a new RITA category be created ‘the diversity category’ and you can imagine how well that went over. But that’s some of the thinking that is still unfortunately common in the genre.

Tessa Dare had a great tweet about what it means to think critically about inclusive stories and story lines and how this generation is hungry for that kind of intersectional story telling and that if romance does not deliver these readers won’t stick—they’ll/we’ll find what we are looking for elsewhere.

So we can and will link to the NPR piece and talk about that too

AAR—All About Romance released a 100 best list for the first time since 2013 and there wasn’t a single author of color on the list—post RITA conflagration—and within hours the site took down the list, and apologized. It went back up with Beverly Jenkins named spelled Beverly Jackson and some other egregious problems but Romancelandia is particularly receptive, reactive in some ways to itself.

What can I do?

The best way we as readers can influence this stuff is to read a diversity of stories and hold authors accountable when they get it wrong. Not in a shitty way, but in a ‘hey it’s 2018 do better’ way ‘think about this better’. This is such a responsive field it’s worth it always to be a part of that conversation and to listen and believe authors of color when they say the system is hurting them. We all need to do better and in that sense we get to react with our dollars.

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[reading a romance novel] thank god these two idiots are finally fucking each other

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What we talked about when we also talked about “Shanna”

 Lambrusco (wine)

The Good Catholic (movie)

Their Finest (movie)

Tess D’Ubervilles (novel)

Black Mirror flesh robot episode (TV show) 

Prince of Persia (movie)

Wormwood (Miniseries)

Victoria (TV show)

Poldark (TV show)

My Mother and Other Strangers (TV show)

You’ll Be in My Heart (song from the animated movie Tarzan)

Newgate Prison (place)

Taika Waititi on Tipsy Talk (Youtube video)

Rocky (movie)

Pussy Bow (blouse)

The Christmas Prince (movie)

The Princess Diaries makeover scene

Irn-Bru (beverage)

Mr. Collins (character)

Indentured servitude

Sandals (commercials)

40 Year-Old Virgin (movie)

Burt Reynolds (very important picture)

Sneakin’ Around With You (very important song)

Clark Gable Buzzfeed article

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Well hooooooowdy this week we are taking on the Western subgenre with MONTANA SKY by Nora Roberts. Saddle up and tune in lil’ doggies.(Whoa!mance)

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“I think capitalism...”

Wait! Get off that time machine! Because this week we cover our FIRST. EVER. CONTEMPORARY. ROMANCE.

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ANOTHER fabulous romance article for Valentine’s Day, from the always excellent Kelly Faircloth and featuring several talented authors: 

Sierra Simone

Alisha Rai

Donna Herron and Bree Bridges (AKA Kit Rocha)

Sarah MacLean

Maya Rodale.

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“I think you’re gonna have to walk that back when we get to something else.”

Give a listen to our episode on BEAST by Judith Ivory, possibly of the Baltimore Ivories.