Rachel Kramer Bussel, born in 1975, is an American writer, columnist, and editor whose work is erotica, especially anthologies that put kink, spanking, D/s, and female submission on bookstore shelves in bulk. She studied at the New York University School of Law and earned a bachelor’s degree in political science and women’s studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Readers who buy themed smut by the collection, rather than by the single novel, use her name as a marker: the cover already says the heat and the power-exchange theme. The people in the books are adults.
Penthouse, weeklies, and the web
She has been a senior editor at Penthouse Variations and a contributing editor at Penthouse, which kept her in commercial erotica’s industrial core rather than only in indie literary smut. She has blogged for The Huffington Post, worked as a rotating interviewer for Gothamist, written a column for SexIs Magazine, and contributed to the Village Voice. Glossy adult publishing, alt-weekly writing, and online sex commentary are the same toolkit she uses when she packages anthologies for the trade.
The books and In the Flesh
She has written many erotic short stories and gathered her own work and other people’s into dozens of books. On the BDSM shelf the branding is plain. Two volumes of Naughty Spanking Stories from A to Z sit next to the paired collections He’s On Top and She’s On Top, split by the gender of the dominant. Lesbian titles include Glamour Girls and First-Timers. In the early 2000s she co-edited with Alison Tyler, Stacy Bias, Wendy Caster, Julie May, and Christopher Pierce.
From 2005 to 2010 she curated In the Flesh, a monthly erotic reading series in New York City. Written sex had a room and an audience between book releases.
Bisexuality, Teaneck, and the Samois awards
She identifies as bisexual. In 2006 she said she would ideally like a male lover and a female lover, either a triad or separate one-on-one relationships. She has lived in Teaneck, New Jersey. Those public comments sit beside the editorial focus on female pleasure and submission. They are not hidden behind a vanilla author brand.
In 2009 she received an Independent Publisher Book Award for the anthologies Tasting Him and Tasting Her. The National Leather Association International gave her the Samois Anthology Award three times: in 2012 for Surrender: Erotic Tales of Female Pleasure and Submission, in 2016 for Dirty Dates: Erotic Fantasies For Couples, and in 2019 for The Big Book Of Submission Volume 2. Those NLA-I honors mark her inside leather literary culture for edited books of female submission and couple fantasy. A three-time Samois editor is part of how that culture still tracks multi-author submission books.
