Rachel Kramer Bussel Books in Order

Rachel Kramer Bussel grew up in Teaneck, New Jersey, later spent time living in Berkeley and New York, and has built a career that rarely stays in one lane for long. She has worked as an author, editor, essayist, workshop teacher, event host, and journalist, often doing several of those jobs at once.

Writing found her before any neat career plan did.

In the late 1990s, while she was in law school and reading a lot of erotica, she saw a call for submissions to a celebrity-themed anthology and decided to try writing a story herself. That piece, "Monica and Me," was accepted and published in 2000. What started as one experiment turned into the work of her adult life.

A few years later, editing joined the picture. Bussel went on to co-edit and then edit anthology after anthology, eventually working on more than seventy of them. She became closely associated with collections like Best Sex Writing and Best Women's Erotica of the Year, and her books have won multiple Independent Publisher Book Awards. For five years she also hosted the In The Flesh erotic reading series in New York, helping create a live home for writers whose work was often read privately.

If you want a sense of her range, start with Everything But, a sexually frank romance about a woman testing the rules she has set for herself. Then move to The Art of the Erotic Love Letter, which takes fantasy and flirtation off the screen and onto the page. Her 2024 collection Lap Dance Lust pulls together stories from across twenty-five years of writing, while books like Sex and Cupcakes and How to Write Erotica show the mix of candor, humor, and practical know-how that runs through so much of her work.

She has never treated sex writing as a tiny corner of the culture.

Even when the work is explicit, Bussel is usually interested in more than shock value. Again and again, she returns to questions of fantasy, communication, power, shame, pleasure, and the gap between what people are told to want and what they actually want. Her anthologies also show how wide that field can be, making room for queer stories, kink, romance, humor, and essays about the politics around sex.

She holds a bachelor's degree in political science and women's studies from the University of California at Berkeley, and she has taught erotica writing workshops for years at universities, conferences, bookstores, and sex-positive spaces. Teaching matters to her because so much of her career has been built not just on publishing work, but on helping other writers get braver and more precise on the page.

Readers who click with Bussel often like her directness. She doesn't wrap desire in lofty language, and she doesn't treat it like a joke either. Whether she is writing about lingerie, abstinence, dirty talk, or a very specific kink, she tends to focus on voice, curiosity, and the little details that make a scene feel lived in rather than generic.

In recent years, her work has widened beyond erotica without really leaving its core interests behind. Alongside sex writing and book journalism, she has written personal essays about money, hoarding, body image, relationships, family, and motherhood for a long list of publications. She now lives in New Jersey, runs the personal essay magazine Open Secrets, organizes the live event Open Secrets Live, and hosts the podcast Finders and Keepers. That newer work feels connected to the older work, too. She has long been interested in what people keep private, what they reveal, and what happens when they finally put it into words.