Dear Professor Books in Order

The Dear Professor series takes Penny Reid's love of academia and tilts it toward new adult romance, playing with the tension between formal classroom roles and the messy reality of attraction. These are shorter, tightly focused stories where most of the action happens on campus or in nearby city haunts.

Each book follows a student and a professor who meet outside the classroom under less than ideal circumstances, then have to renegotiate who they are to one another once the semester begins. In Kissing Tolstoy, a woman discovers that the charming blind date she can not stop thinking about is now her Russian literature professor. Kissing Galileo pairs a struggling student with a brilliant but socially awkward research methods instructor after an extremely embarrassing first encounter.

Rather than leaning on pure taboo for shock value, the series digs into boundaries, power, and professionalism. The professors worry about ethics, reputations, and their students' futures. The heroines have their own ambitions and agency, and their choices carry weight beyond whether they end up together. Romantic beats unfold through office hour conversations, group projects, late night study sessions, and the small rituals of university life.

At the same time, these books keep Penny's trademark humor. There are snarky inner monologues, disastrous dates, and friends who are more than happy to offer color commentary. The academic settings give her an excuse to sprinkle in references to Tolstoy, statistics, and scientific papers alongside kissing in libraries and arguments over grading curves.

Dear Professor stories can be read independently from her other work, but they share DNA with the Hypothesis books and the Knitting in the City series. Readers who enjoy brainy heroines, prickly heroes, and romance that takes consent and communication seriously will find these novellas a quick, satisfying stop in Penny Reid's larger world.