Gwendolyn Osborne

Gwendolyn Osborne (a.k.a “The Word Diva”) is a freelance writer based in Chicago. She is a hopeless romantic and an unabashed book junkie. She prefers to be called “Gwen,” but unapologetically uses the longer version in her bylines “because it takes up more space in print.”

Gwen began her journalism career as a reviewer for The Detroit Free Press. Her work has also appeared in several national publications including Book Magazine, Mode Magazine, and The Crisis, the organizational publication of the NAACP. She also served as an associate editor for Black Issues Book Review.

Gwen enjoys well-written novels about women who are smart, feisty and funny, and men who know how to appreciate such a woman. Beverly Jenkins, Brenda Jackson, Carla Fredd, Rochelle Alers, Janice Sims, Evelyn Palfrey, Gay G. Gunn, Lori Foster, Vicki Lewis Thompson and Susan Elizabeth Phillips (the Chicago Stars series) are among her favorite romance novelists. She enjoys discovering the new authors she adds to her Emerging Authors List.

When she’s not reading romance, Gwen enjoys books on tape and the continuing characters created in mysteries by a growing number of African-American writers she calls “Sister Sleuths.” These include Valerie Wilson Wesley, Barbara Neely, Paula Woods, Evelyn Coleman, Karen Grigsby Bates, Ardella Garland, Pamela Thomas Graham. She is also a fan of Walter Mosley, of Gar Anthony Haywood’s Loudermilk series and of the Detroit-based mysteries by Gary Hardwick, Lee Meadows and Sterling Anthony. Works by novelists Tina McElroy Ansa and Pearl Cleage, poet Nikki Giovanni, artist Jonathan Green, historian Darlene Clark Hine and playwright August Wilson share space on her keeper shelf with her favorite romances and mysteries.

Osborne passed May 14, 2022, at age 72.