Rachel Kramer Bussel (born 1975) is an American author, columnist, and editor who specialized in erotica—especially anthologies that put kink, spanking, D/s, and female submission on bookstore shelves in volume. 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. For readers who buy themed smut by the collection rather than the single novel, her name is a reliable imprint of curated desire: short-story packs you can hand to a partner with a clear heat level and power-exchange theme already on the cover.
Magazines, Columns, and Public Platforms
Bussel has been a Senior Editor at Penthouse Variations, a Contributing Editor at Penthouse, and a blogger for The Huffington Post. She has worked as a rotating interviewer for Gothamist, written a column for SexIs Magazine, and contributed to the Village Voice. That portfolio bridges glossy adult publishing, alt-weekly culture writing, and online sex commentary—useful infrastructure for an editor who also packs anthologies for the trade. The Penthouse-world posts in particular kept her inside commercial erotica’s industrial core rather than only indie literary smut circles.
Kink Anthologies and Co-Editors
She has written many erotic short stories and collected her own and others’ work in dozens of published volumes. Specialized BDSM shelves include two volumes of Naughty Spanking Stories from A to Z and the paired power-exchange collections He’s On Top and She’s On Top—explicit brand architecture for top and bottom fantasy by gender of the dominant. Lesbian erotica titles include Glamour Girls and First-Timers. She has co-edited with peers including Alison Tyler, Stacy Bias, Wendy Caster, Julie May, and Christopher Pierce—a network map of early-2000s commercial erotica collaboration. From 2005 to 2010 she curated the monthly New York City erotic reading series In the Flesh, keeping written sex in a live room rather than only on the page. For scene-adjacent literary nightlife, that series is part of how anthology editors built audiences between book releases.
Personal Life
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 been a resident of Teaneck, New Jersey. Public comments about orientation and relationship structure sit next to her editorial focus on female pleasure and submission rather than behind a pure-vanilla author brand.
Awards
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: 2012 for Surrender: Erotic Tales of Female Pleasure and Submission, 2016 for Dirty Dates: Erotic Fantasies For Couples, and 2019 for The Big Book Of Submission Volume 2. Those NLA-I honors specifically flag her as leather-community-recognized for edited volumes of female submission and couple fantasy—not only as a general erotica brand name. A three-time Samois Anthology Award editor is infrastructure for how leather literary culture still tracks multi-author submission books.
