Alyssa Cole is an American author of romance and thrillers, born in the Bronx in 1982, celebrated for warm, whip-smart love stories and for widening the place of Black characters and authors in the genre.
She writes across eras and moods. Her Reluctant Royals series opens with A Princess in Theory, in which a hard-working epidemiology graduate student dismisses the emails claiming she is betrothed to an African prince as a scam - until the prince turns up in person. Her Loyal League novels, beginning with An Extraordinary Union, turn to the American Civil War and a formerly enslaved woman working as a Union spy, a series praised for wearing its history with unusual seriousness.
She is equally accomplished in suspense: When No One Is Watching, a thriller about gentrification and disappearances in a changing Brooklyn neighbourhood, won the Edgar Award for best paperback original, and she has since written One of Us Knows. An Extraordinary Union took the American Library Association's award for best romance, A Princess in Theory was a New York Times Notable Book, and she has been honoured with an NAACP Image Award.
A self-described 'pop-culture nerd and romance junkie', she divides her life between New York and Martinique.
