American Romantic Writers File for Bankruptcy Protection After Several years of struggle and accusations of racism that split the organization, forcing many of its members to flee.
A Texas-based trade association that bills itself as the voice of romance writers has lost about 80% of its members over the past five years due to the unrest.
Now, with just 2,000 members left, it can’t cover the costs it incurred to pay for writers’ conferences, according to bankruptcy court documents filed Wednesday in Houston.
The organization, founded in 1980 to represent and promote writers in fiction’s most popular genre, said it owes nearly $3 million to the hotels where it planned to hold its annual meetings.
Mary Ann Jock, the group’s president and the author of seven published romance novels, said in a court filing that the problems arose “primarily due to disputes over diversity, equity and inclusion” between previous board members and others in the romance writing community. .
Its membership dropped again after the annual conference was held virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Carollynn H.G. Callari, the association’s lawyer, said it has no intention of stopping its activities. She said the proposed reorganization plan submitted to the court should allow the group to quickly emerge from bankruptcy protection and have a healthier financial outlook.
Relations within the group began to deteriorate in 2019 over the way it treated one of its writers, a Chinese-American writer who she said violated the group’s code with negative online comments about other writers and their work. The association reversed its decision, but the scandal led to the resignation of its president and several board members.
Following accusations that it lacks diversity and is predominantly white, the organization canceled its annual awards in 2020. Several publishers, including Harlequin, Avon Books and Berkeley Romance, then withdrew from the annual conference. The association later said it would introduce new reward in honor of Vivian Stevens, a pioneering black writer and publisher.
The following year, the association faced even more anger and ultimately withdrew the award for the novel, which was widely criticized for its sympathetic portrait of a cavalry officer involved in the massacre of Lakota Indians at the Battle of Wounded Knee.