Stacey Abramss new childrens book, Staceys Extraordinary Words, sheds lights on her e

In Stacey Abrams’s new book, a girl with curly hair and a gap between her front teeth enters a spelling bee and confronts her own self-doubt and a boy named Jake.

For people who have followed the Georgia Democrat’s political career, the story could be read as a metaphor for her gubernatorial campaign.

But “Stacey’s Extraordinary Words,” released this week, is also about Abrams’s lifelong love of words and her experience competing in her first spelling bee.

In an author’s note, Abrams writes of spending hours after school at the college library where her mother worked, finding refuge in words. “Whenever Stacey learned a new word, it was like making a new friend,” Abrams wrote of the girl in the book. Words “never teased her about being quiet. Or about being clumsy when she fell. Or awkward when the joke in her head came out wrong.”

“Stacey’s Extraordinary Words” is the 12th book by Abrams, who has also written several romance novels and a best-selling political thriller, among others. But she said the children’s book, illustrated by Kitt Thomas, has been her most challenging writing project.

“You’ve got to be able to take complex ideas and be respectful of how smart kids are, but also make it accessible,” she said. “In traditional fiction, you’ve got 65 [thousand] to 100,000 words to tell a story. Getting it done in 750 words takes a very different approach.”

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Her favorite children’s books include “The Phantom Tollbooth,” by Norton Juster, and “Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears,” by Verna Aardema. She also has special affection for “Make Way for Ducklings” by Robert McClosky. “I love that book. It makes me smile to this day. It reminds me of my mom and dad and my siblings and just how loving and protective that family was,” Abrams, the second-oldest of six children, said at a virtual book event this week. Her parents, Robert and Carolyn Abrams, moved the family from Gulfport, Miss., to Atlanta, where they studied at Emory University and became Methodist ministers.

The book comes a few weeks after Abrams announced her rematch against Gov. Brian Kemp (R), who won by about 55,000 votes in 2018. Abrams, a former minority leader of the Georgia General Assembly, declined to concede to Kemp at the time. Instead she launched Fair Fight, a voting rights advocacy group, and sued Georgia election officials, citing gross mismanagement of the process and voter suppression. A trial could begin in federal court in February.

In the three years since that campaign, which attracted national attention, Abrams’s name recognition has grown. But she has remained focused on making Democrats competitive in Georgia. Through Fair Fight Action, she has continued to advocate for voting rights, raising more than $100 million since 2018. She has also challenged Georgia’s restrictive voting laws and policies in court, and provided money to help grass-roots organizations register and mobilize diverse groups of voters.

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President Biden and others have credited her for helping to turn the state blue in the 2020 presidential race. A month later, Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael G. Warnock defeated two sitting Republicans in Senate runoff elections, handing Democrats control of Congress.

Abrams’s success in increasing voter turnout has been praised and copied by other Democratic candidates and activists. This time, she said, the task of motivating voters will require “acknowledging the very real pain and the exceptional challenges that are facing our communities.”

“This cannot be a campaign that focuses solely on the future and promises of what can be. We’ve got to grapple with what is and what is going unaddressed by the current failed leadership,” Abrams said, referring to Kemp. She cited the more than 26,000 people who have died of covid-19 in Georgia, which has recorded more than 1.3 million cases.

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“We have broken health-care infrastructure, we have a broken educational system, and we have an ineffective leader who has failed in his job,” Abrams said.

In an email, Kemp campaign spokesman Tate Mitchell challenged Abrams’s characterizations. “Stacey Abrams may have missed this as she criss-crossed the country lining her own pocket on lies about Georgia’s election integrity bill, but under Governor Kemp’s leadership, Georgia’s unemployment rate now sits at record lows, job creation and investment are through the roof, and more Georgians have a job than any point since the early 2000s,” he said.

Mitchell also defended Kemp’s handling of the pandemic, saying the governor “has remained laser-focused on protecting both the lives and livelihoods of all Georgians.” He said the state paid for extra staff at hospitals and that “millions of Georgians have been vaccinated against the virus … and the Peach State is leading the nation in economic recovery.”

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Republicans and conservative activists have lobbed criticism at Abrams for refusing to concede in 2018 and have dismissed her allegations of voter suppression. Former senator David Perdue, who was defeated in that runoff vote, is challenging Kemp for the GOP gubernatorial nomination, at former president Donald Trump’s urging.

Andrea Abrams said her younger sister is ready for the attacks from the other side. "She has always been mature, but there is something really wise and calm now about how she encounters adversity,” Abrams said in an interview. “I think, because she’s been tested … she knows what it is to win, and she knows what it is to not win. And so she’s just more calm and wise about how she steps into these adversarial situations and new challenges.”

Stacey Abrams says her older sister taught her to read. Andrea, now vice president for diversity, equity and inclusion and associate professor of anthropology at Centre College in Kentucky, said she and her sister are “television buddies” who share “The Twilight Zone” as their favorite show. “We watch the marathons and there’s always one we’ve never seen before, and I don’t know how that keeps happening,” she said.

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In Abrams’s new book, young Stacey is worried about taking on Jake in the spelling bee. She describes him as “a bully who knew words too. Just yesterday, he had used a complicated word that made Suki cry. Last week, she’d heard him say something cruel to Zivko about his accent.” Young Stacey admits to being “intimidated” by Jake, who “sometimes said hurtful things to her too. She wished she had used her clever words to help Suki or Zivko or herself by speaking up.”

The scene touches an issue that some Republican and conservative activists are hoping to use as a cultural cudgel in next year’s elections: how race and diversity issues are handled in schools. Critical race theory, a set of arguments by legal scholars to explain structural racism, is discussed in college lecture halls, not K-12 classrooms. But conservatives have seized on the term to protest any teaching about the role of racism in the country’s history, saying that it makes White children feel ashamed.

Abrams said images of contentious school board meetings suggest “we’re also seeing are parents who are just overwhelmed and who have used this as a proxy for a host of concerns and a host of challenges that they are not resourced to face. I think we first approach the angst and anger with some degree of compassion.”

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That doesn’t mean that political leaders, school officials and parents bow to the pressure from activists trying to “weaponize diversity,” Abrams said.

“The argument is one of whether we are going to offer children an honest education and the whole history of who we are in order to make them resilient and strong and effective leaders,” Abrams said. “Rather than getting drawn into an argument about the words people are using, we need to focus also on what they’re not saying and what’s behind those words. I’m focused on making sure that we are demanding an honest education for our children and that we teach the whole history.”

“I don’t think we want to live in a country where we do not understand and talk about Martin Luther King Jr. and what he did," she said. "But you cannot talk about him without talking about the legacy of racism and slavery and classism. You can’t celebrate our Sally Ride without acknowledging the challenges that were faced by Sally Ride and by Katherine Johnson and others in the space race.”

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Mitchell said Kemp “believes Georgia students should not be subjected to indoctrination with divisive ideologies that pit kids against each other, but instead taught the complete and accurate history of our state and nation.”

Abrams said Democrats face other challenges in next year’s midterms. They will have to hone their message to keep their base motivated, given the Biden administration’s struggle to move major parts of its legislative agenda through the Senate.

Abrams said Democrats are “doing their best to deliver.”

“Voting isn’t magic and an election doesn’t guarantee the outcome. It guarantees a potential, and when you elect the right people, it guarantees the effort,” she said.

“I’ve been unequivocal about my honesty with voters that should I become governor of Georgia, that does not mean that suddenly the conservative, hard-right, anti-family policies are going to disappear. It doesn’t mean that we can suddenly unwind all of the failures and the missteps and the meanness that has become so pervasive under Brian Kemp,” she said. “But it does mean I’m going to try.”

Abrams said voters have to do their part by continuing to participate. “When we give up, the other side gets back what little we gained. It’s a cumulative process. We’ve got to keep at it.”

In the new book, young Stacey says one of her favorite words is “perseverance.”

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