Captured at Private Home in Atlanta, Georgia, USA — settings: Camera: ILCE-9, focal length: 147mm, SS: 1/320, Aperture: f/5.6, ISO: 200, Flash: off — by Kevin Lowery(Kevin Lowery/Kevin Lowery / kevinlowery.com)Stacey Abrams is best known as a politician and voting rights activist. She’s also a bestselling author of books across several genres.In the first interview of the latest season of the award-winning LPM podcast “Race Unwrapped,” hosted and produced by Michelle Tyrene Johnson, Abrams talks to Johnson about her writing. This season’s theme is the power of art as protest. You can listen to the whole interview with Abrams here.This excerpt of the conversation has been edited for length and clarity.Michelle Tyrene Johnson: What is it when people leave your thrillers that you want to leave them with?Stacey Abrams: I want them to feel smarter about the world they're in and not outmatched by it. I'm nosy, I've been nosy for a very long time, and even as a child, my nosiness was well-matched, because my mother was a research librarian, so she said, “Go look it up.” There was really no question, you had to look it up, and that expanded my curiosity, but it also made me feel more equipped to deal with things I wasn't supposed to understand, and so I like to weave together topics that seem disparate, seem complicated, and that have power in our lives in ways that we aren't always invited to understand, and then I like to wrap them in a murder or over romance, or or a little bit of both. I want to give the reader a chance to leave the story not feeling like they're an expert, but feeling like they could hold their own.MTJ: I loved how you have all these different ways you come at it: the romance, the ticking clock of a mystery, explaining politics. I just read that the Avery Keene books are part of a series, so I get to visit Avery again. So, what is it that you think a series can do when you're writing about these different issues?SA: When my parents became ministers, they said you meet people where they are, not where you want them to be. And for them, which means that you aren't there for the converted, but for the people who need you. Part of your job in the pastorate is to go to where they are. As a writer, as someone who believes in democracy, I think I've got to go to where my readers are, and so I want to have something there for everyone who decides they want to meet me in that space. I get as close to where they are as possible, but if you want someone to open a book, you've got to give them a reason. In each of the books, I try to tackle a core policy issue that I think is big and unwieldy and incredibly important, so with “Justice Sleeps,” it was biogenetics, and with “Rogue Justice,” I actually grapple with our electrical grid and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which seemed completely unconnected. But I'm a fiction writer, so I have to bring them together. And then in the most recent story, “Coded Justice,” it looks at the intersection of AI, DEI, and veterans' healthcare.MTJ: Do you find being a Black woman storyteller an act of activism all its own?SA: Absolutely. When the Avery Keene series started, one of the first questions I was asked about was the race of the characters. I'm very clear about their race, but I also am not explicit about saying, “This Black person said this.” I've embedded markers in the story, but I also wanted to express the universality of their experiences and the complexity of their lives. ...read more read less