Abrams, Stacey Yvonne, 1973-,
American politician and author, b. Gulfport, Ms., Spelman College (B.A., 1995); Univ. of Texas
(Masters of Public Affairs, 1998), Yale Law School (J.D., 1999). The daughter of Methodist
ministers, Abrams moved with her family to Atlanta, Georgia, where she attended Spelman
College. After earning a law degree, she worked in private practice until she was appointed an
Atlanta deputy city attorney in 2002. Four years later, she successfully ran for the Georgia
House of Representatives and was elected the legislature’s minority leader in 2010.
Abrams resigned from the Assembly to run for governor in 2018, but was defeated by Republican
Brian Kemp. In 2019, she was the first African-American woman to give the Democratic rebuttal
to the president’s State of the Union address. That August, she founded Fair Fight
2020, to protect voting rights, and her organization was credited with registering an
estimated 800,000 new voters in Georgia alone. Abrams has pursued a separate career as the
author of several romantic-suspense novels, writing under the pseudonym of Selena Montgomery.
In 2022, Abrams was again the Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia, but lost to Kemp a
second time.
See her political writings (2018, 2020).
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