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, when Joe Biden narrowly won the state, and in Georgia's 2020–21 regularly scheduled and special U.S. Senate elections, which gave Democrats control of 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 narrowly lost the election to Republican candidate Brian Kemp, but refused to concede, accusing Kemp of engaging in voter suppression as Georgia Secretary of State. News outlets and political science experts have been unable to determine whether voter suppression affected its result. In February 2019, Abrams became the first African-American woman to deliver a response to the State of the Union address. She was the Democratic nominee in the 2022 Georgia gubernatorial election, and lost again to Kemp, this time by a much larger margin; she conceded on the night of the election.

Abrams is 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. Abrams wrote eight fiction books under the pen name Selena Montgomery before 2021. While Justice Sleeps was released on May 11, 2021, under her real name. Abrams also wrote a children's book, Stacey's Extraordinary Words, released in December 2021.