Stacey Abrams

Stacey Yvonne Abrams (/ˈeɪbrəmz/; born December 9, 1973) is an American politician, lawyer, voting rights activist, and author who served in the Georgia House of Representatives from 2007 to 2017, serving as minority leader from 2011 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Abrams founded Fair Fight Action, an organization to address voter suppression, in 2018. Her efforts have been widely credited with boosting voter turnout in Georgia, including in the 2020 presidential election, where Joe Biden narrowly won the state, and in Georgia's 2020–2021 U.S. Senate election and special election, which gave Democrats control over the Senate.

Abrams was the Democratic nominee in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election, becoming the first African-American female major-party gubernatorial nominee in the United States. She lost to Brian Kemp in an election marked by accusations that Kemp engaged in voter suppression as Georgia secretary of state. In February 2019, Abrams became the first African-American woman to deliver a response to the State of the Union address.

Abrams has also found success as an author of both fiction and nonfiction. Her nonfiction books, Our Time Is Now and Lead from the Outside, were New York Times best sellers. Outside of politics, Abrams has published eight fiction books, using the pen name Selena Montgomery until 2021. Her latest work of fiction, While Justice Sleeps, was released on May 11, 2021, under her real name.