A sparkling platinum diamond band, a sprig of mistletoe and the silhouette of a bride beckoning from within: for some, the cover images of the newly-released romance novel, A Madaris Bride For Christmas, signifies the release of just another book. But for New York Times and USA Today bestselling author and NAACP Image Award Nominee, Brenda Jackson, ….Christmas represents a unique and unintended milestone.

“I’m the first African-American author who’s published 100 books,” Jackson recently stated by phone. “When I first started 18 years ago, I was gonna write five books and that was it. My 50th book came out in 2007 and now, six years later, here is my 100th. As long as God keeps giving me the ideas for stories, I’ll continue to do it.”

It isn’t only numbers making Jackson a pioneer; along with contemporaries such as Donna Hill, Beverly Jenkins and the late, Dallas-based Francis Ray, the Florida native created a seismic shift towards increasing publication of romance novels written by and about African-Americans.

“Major book publishers believed that black romances didn’t sell,” says Jackson, who eventually became the first author to sell books under the Harlequin/Silhouette Desire imprint and the first national best-seller within the African-American romance genre. “One publisher loved my story and would buy it if I changed my characters to white [people]. So it was very hard.”

But after the breakaway success of Terry McMillan’s 1992 Waiting to Exhale, however, many editors were suddenly eager to capitalize on the underserved market.

“Walter Zacharius, the founder of Kensington [Books], started a line for African-American books [Arabesque] and gave us our first break,” Jackson said. “We were paid less, but they gave us beautiful covers and put our books in places that we never dreamed of. The line became successful and proved what we were trying to tell them all along—that black women wanted to read about men and women together that looked like them and would support us. We could barely keep the books on the shelves.”

It’s now common to walk into bookstores and see multicultural heroes and heroines, but Jackson remembers when the range of her characters were limited by shallow stereotypes rather than her own imagination. “I was writing about the type of romantic guy I married (her husband of 40-plus years, Gerald) and the guy my daddy was, a man who brought my mom flowers for her birthday and did sweet things,” Jackson said. “Publishers were telling me, ‘That’s not how America thinks of African-American men.’ In other words, others perceived all our men as being in jail, on drugs and having babies everywhere. Anything else seemed totally foreign to them.”

Today, Brenda Jackson’s beloved characters have spawned an empire of
popular novels and novellas. Thousands of readers championing her fictitious families (the Montgomerys, the Savoys, the Steeles,
the Westmorelands and the Madarises, etc.) and supported her independently-released book-to-film adaptation, 2011’s Truly
Everlasting, which Netflix recently added.

Jackson has inspired other novelists and introduced readers to what she’s maintained in her own life, an enduring love story.

“People sometimes ask me, ‘Why don’t you write about the real stuff
[out in the world]?'” she asks. “But to me, that is the real stuff.
It used to bother me years ago when others, including other Black
women, used to dismiss what I write as ‘crap’: I would be thinking,
‘What’s wrong with a book talking about a true commitment between a
man and a woman?’

My novels may not be ‘real,’ but a lot of women
want the unreal, they want to escape and need that fantasy. You can
turn the TV on if you want ‘the real,’ but an escape is what I give
them and people know the difference. That’s the type of story that I
like to write.”