Black Male Romance Authors You Should Be Reading

Last updated: November 3, 2026

If you go looking for Black male romance authors, you won't find a long list. That isn't because the books aren't good. It's because there aren't many of us writing in this genre, and the ones who have done it haven't always gotten the shelf space or the attention they earned.

I'm Corey L. Johnson. I write Black romance in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and I built this page to put the names in one place: the men who opened this lane, the men who held it down in category romance and on the indie side, and the men writing in it right now. For every author you'll find the book I'd hand you first, what his love stories do best, and who they're for.

Full disclosure, because you should hear it from me: I'm on this list too, down at the end with the newer voices. Read the others first if you want. They're the standard I'm trying to live up to.

The list at a glance

Short on time? Start here. Every name on this page, the first book to try, and the reader it's best for.

The foundations

Two men proved, at bestseller scale, that readers would show up in huge numbers for love stories about Black life written by Black men. Everything after them stands on that proof.

E. Lynn Harris (1955 to 2009)

Harris didn't wait for permission. In 1991 he self-published his first novel, Invisible Life, and sold it himself, hand delivering copies to Black owned bookstores and beauty salons. Anchor Books picked the book up and reissued it in 1994, and Harris went on to place ten books in a row on the New York Times bestseller list, with millions of copies in print.

His novels follow Raymond Tyler and a circle of Black professionals working out love, friendship, careers, and honesty about who they are. At a time when almost nobody in mainstream publishing was printing love stories about Black gay and bisexual men, Harris wrote them as full, warm, hopeful stories, and readers carried them everywhere by word of mouth.

Start here: Invisible Life, then Just As I Am.

Read him if: you want the roots of this whole list, and love stories where telling the truth about yourself is the real plot.

Eric Jerome Dickey (1961 to 2021)

If Harris opened the door, Dickey kicked it wide. Born in Memphis, he broke out with Sister, Sister in 1996 and became a New York Times bestselling author many times over with books like Milk in My Coffee, Friends and Lovers, Cheaters, Liar's Game, and Between Lovers. His love stories are funny, sharp, and honest about how grown people actually mess up, apologize, and try again.

He kept writing to the end of his life. The Business of Lovers, published in 2020, follows two brothers who are both unlucky in work and in love, and it shows the same voice readers had trusted for more than twenty years. Nobody on this page has sold Black love stories to a bigger audience.

Start here: Friends and Lovers for the classic, or The Business of Lovers for the later work.

Read him if: you like your romance with comedy, conflict, and characters who have to grow up before they can pair up.

The men who held the lane down

While the big names above got the headlines, other Black men kept writing love stories through the 2000s and 2010s, in urban fiction, in category romance, and in queer romance, often building their own audiences to do it.

Travis Hunter

Hunter, an Army veteran from Florence, South Carolina, who lives outside Atlanta, has said plainly why he started: he couldn't find books with positive Black men in them, so he wrote one. He self-published The Hearts of Men in 2000 through his own company, took it to Book Expo America in Chicago, and came home with an offer from Random House, which reissued the book in 2001.

His novels keep coming back to the same honest question: what does a man owe the woman he loves, and what does it cost him to learn it late? His character Genesis Styles carries that question across Married But Still Looking and, years later, Married But Not Really (2018), which takes on childhood trauma, infidelity, and mental health without letting love off the hook. Hunter also founded the Hearts of Men Foundation, which mentors young men and teens.

Start here: The Hearts of Men, then Married But Still Looking.

Read him if: you want love stories about men being held accountable, written by a man talking to men as much as to romance readers.

Wayne Jordan

Jordan writes from Barbados, where he taught literature and theatre arts, and he may be the hardest working man on this page. In 1999, years before social media made it easy, he founded Romance in Color, a website built to be a resource for African American romance readers and authors. Plenty of writers in this genre found their first readers there.

His own debut, Capture the Sunrise, came out in 2005 from BET Books' Arabesque line, and he went on to write for Harlequin Kimani, the African American romance line, with many of his stories set in Barbados. He also conceived Decades: A Journey of African American Romance, a twelve book series with each story set in a different decade from the 1900s to the 2010s. His entry, Promise Me a Dream, is set in the 1960s, against the Civil Rights Movement.

Start here: Capture the Sunrise for contemporary category romance, or Promise Me a Dream for historical.

Read him if: you love category romance, island settings, and stories where Black history and Black love share the page.

Frederick Smith

Smith, originally from Detroit, has spent twenty years centering the romantic lives of Black and Latinx queer men, a corner of romance that publishing barely touched when he started. Down for Whatever follows four friends in Los Angeles, each looking for Mr. Right. Its follow-up, Right Side of the Wrong Bed, was a Lambda Literary Award finalist.

He hasn't slowed down. Play It Forward pairs a community activist with a professional basketball player. With co-author Chaz Lamar Cruz he wrote In Case You Forgot and Busy Ain't the Half of It, and his latest, One and Done, is a Black queer romance set in the world of Bay Area higher education. If you want to see what a long, steady career in Black queer romance looks like, this is it.

Start here: Right Side of the Wrong Bed, or In Case You Forgot for his recent work with Cruz.

Read him if: you want ensemble casts, chosen family, and love stories that treat Black queer men as romantic leads, full stop.

Writing right now

The newest names on this page are in bookstores today, and they're writing a different kind of Black male romance: the romcom, with fake dating, second chances, and happy endings that don't have to be argued for.

Kosoko Jackson

Jackson, born and raised in the Washington, D.C. area, came up through young adult fiction, including Yesterday Is History, a time travel romance. His adult romance debut, I'm So (Not) Over You (2022, Berkley), is a romcom with a classic setup done right: aspiring journalist Kian Andrews agrees to fake date his wealthy ex, Hudson Rivers, in front of Hudson's parents, and one dinner turns into a plus one invitation to the Georgia wedding of the season.

Publishers Weekly called the book a nuanced romance and Jackson a writer to watch in adult romance, and that's right. Under the banter, the book is about class, family approval, and whether a second chance is worth the risk when the first try already hurt.

Start here: I'm So (Not) Over You.

Read him if: fake dating and second chance are your tropes, and you like your romcoms fast, funny, and a little bit posh.

Julian Winters

Winters, who lives outside Atlanta, built his name in young adult fiction first. Running With Lions won the IBPA Benjamin Franklin Gold Award, and his YA novels were Junior Library Guild selections. He has said he writes romance because the books he was handed in school rarely gave Black and queer characters happy endings, and he wanted to write the joyful stories he couldn't find.

His adult debut, I Think They Love You (2025), delivers on that. Denzel "Denz" Carter fake dates his ex to prove he's ready to take over from his retiring father as head of the family company. It's a second chance romcom about family, ambition, and learning to love the person you're becoming. The follow-up, Last First Kiss (2026), brings an event planner back into the orbit of the man who broke his heart, at a high profile wedding.

Start here: I Think They Love You, then Last First Kiss.

Read him if: you want big family energy, workplace stakes, and a romcom that treats a Black queer love story as a celebration.

Rodney J. Suggs

Suggs writes from a place I understand: Black men have feelings they don't always know how to say out loud. His trilogy follows a man whose experiences with women and heartbreak leave him wondering whether he should risk loving again, and by Smooth, the third book, he has another choice to make about where his life goes next.

Start here: Love Is Blind, the first in the trilogy. The finale, Smooth, came out in 2025.

Read him if: you want a male point of view and a story willing to let its man be vulnerable.

Lamartz Brown

Brown moves between urban fiction and relationship drama. In Damaged By Necessity: A Stone Cold Love Story (2026), Gina Thompson and A'Shai Blaze have known each other long enough that a fresh start doesn't feel simple. There's attraction, but there's also old hurt and the question of whether either of them can be honest about what they want.

Start here: Damaged By Necessity: A Stone Cold Love Story, published in April 2026.

Read him if: you want a Black man and a Black woman trying to make sense of love after life has left marks on both of them. This is relationship drama, not a breezy romcom, and it's better for it.

Corey L. Johnson

And then there's me. I'm an independent author from Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and I'm the newest name on this page, so I'll keep this short and let the book talk.

My romance is Into You, a standalone slow burn. Kiana plans weddings for a living. Darius ends marriages for a living; he's a divorce lawyer and a single dad who has good reason not to trust the whole idea anymore. Put those two in each other's way and neither one gets to keep the story they told themselves about love. Readers keep telling me the man's point of view is what surprised them, and that's the point. Men fall too. We just don't always fall loud.

If faith is part of your love story, my Rooted in Grace books, The Grass Is Always Greener and The Seeds We Sow, are Christian fiction about second chances, family secrets, and forgiveness. And chapter 1 of my next romance, We Can't Be Friends, is free on this site if you want a low risk way to try my writing.

Start here: Into You, available now on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited.

Read me if: you like slow burns, enemies to lovers tension, and a romance that takes grown folks' real lives seriously.

How this list was built

So you know this isn't just names pulled out of the air, here's the standard I used:

• He's a Black man writing romance or love stories where the relationship is the center of the book, not a subplot.
• He has at least one published book you can still buy or borrow today.
• The list mixes eras on purpose: the foundations, the men who kept the lane alive, and the men publishing now.
• One name per lane where I could manage it, so this page shows how wide the lane actually is: literary, urban, category, queer, romcom, Christian, and indie.

Part of why this list is short is shelving. For years, love stories by Black men were sold as urban fiction, literary fiction, or just fiction, even when the love story was the whole book. Search for the romance and you couldn't find what was already there. Pages like this one exist to fix that, one honest list at a time.

Who did I miss?

Probably somebody, and I'd rather hear it than leave the list wrong. If there's a Black male romance author you think belongs here, send me his name and the book you'd start with through the contact form on this site. If he fits the standard above, he'll go on the page, and the updated date at the top will move with him.

And if you're a Black man writing romance and you're not on here yet, that invitation counts double. This lane gets wider every time one of us publishes.

Questions readers ask

Are there Black male romance authors?

Yes. There are fewer than there should be, and they've never been hard to find because the books were weak. They've been hard to find because of shelving, marketing, and small print runs. This page lists ten, from a 1991 self-published debut that changed the market to romcoms published in the last two years.

Who is the best known Black male romance author?

Historically, Eric Jerome Dickey and E. Lynn Harris. Both were repeated New York Times bestsellers, both sold in the millions, and between them they proved for thirty years that Black love stories by Black men had a mass audience. Among authors publishing new romcoms right now, Julian Winters and Kosoko Jackson are the names most readers meet first.

Where should a new reader start?

By taste. For a modern romcom, start with I Think They Love You or I'm So (Not) Over You. For the classics, Friends and Lovers or Invisible Life. For category romance with a Caribbean setting, Capture the Sunrise. For a slow burn about a wedding planner and a divorce lawyer, written by the man who runs this site, start with Into You.

Why do readers look for romance written by men?

Because the man's side of falling in love is usually the part left off the page. These books put it back: what he's afraid of, what he's carrying, what it costs him to be honest, and what it looks like when he chooses love on purpose. If that angle is what brought you here, nearly every book on this page will give it to you.

Written and maintained by Corey L. Johnson, author of Into You. This page is updated when new names earn a place on it.