On Sunday afternoons when, as a young girl, Gwendolyn Johnson-Acsadi climbed into a backyard tree at her Washington, D.C., home, she always carried a book to read.  There, shaded by the tree's leaves, she'd let the stories transport her into other worlds, other lives, other histories.  Only her mother's voice, calling "Gwendolyn, Gwendolyn," could carry her back to the present.  Back then, she wasn't dreaming of becoming a highly-respected demographer at the United Nations or a best-selling novelist.  But the printed words were already etching their power onto her young mind and, over the years, providing a foundation for what she does today.

These days, Johnson-Acsadi works in two worlds and, appropriately enough, uses two names.  Her demographic clients know her as Gwendolyn Johnson-Acsadi.  To the readers of her award-winning romance novels, she is Gwynne Forster.  The connection between the two seemingly-unrelated professions is a story in itself.  In college, she was attracted to journalism and took sociology courses to prepare.  But she fell in love with demography and population studies and got a masters degree in sociology from Howard University and another in economics/demography from The American University in Washington.  From school, she went to work for the United Nations and, while traveling abroad on that organization's behalf, she met her future husband, Dr. George Acsadi, another demographer.

Johnson-Acsadi's work took her to many countries – by her own count she has visited 63 – representing the UN Secretary General, lecturing, conducting workshops and delivering research at conferences worldwide.  As chief of the Fertility Studies Section of the Population Division, she was responsible for research involving fertility levels and conditions around the world.

It was during one of her many trips that another passion emerged.  Johnson-Acsadi always carried books she would read, then discard when she got to her destination.  But on one flight she was forced to put down her book.  "I was on my way to Manila," she recalls, "and when I was reading, I realized that my eyes were killing me.  I did not want to talk to my seat mates, so I closed my eyes and told myself stories."  Her imagination spun a story that entertained her through the end of the flight.  "A few weeks later, I was on my way to Zimbabwe and the same thing happened," she says.  She noticed that the story she was imagining picked up where the other one had left off, so she decided to write it down.

The realization that she could write a story sparked a desire to do more.  She showed it to a writer friend, who suggested she take a writing class and then attend a Romantic Times Magazine Booklovers Convention in Nashville, Tennessee.  She took in the lessons as well as the excitement and information from the convention, went home and began writing in earnest.  She wanted to get a novel published.

Johnson-Acsadi was not a stranger to publication.  Both she and her husband have published numerous manuscripts, books, chapters in books and studies for the UN, the World Health Organization and The World Bank.  "I knew what I was doing as a demographer, but what I was doing as a fiction writer, I hadn't the slightest idea," she says.  "I was just telling a story." She continued writing and, a year later, in 1994, when the convention was held in New York, Johnson-Acsadi made plans to attend.  Despite feeling sick that day she called a taxi and headed to Times Square for the meeting.  Her decision paid off.  She made connections that opened doors for her work.  "I met the editor and the agent the same day," she says.  After a compressed writing schedule to get the rest of her book to the agent, Johnson-Acsadi received the news in October of the same year that her book had been purchased and she had received a two-book contract.  Sealed With a Kiss hit the bookstands in 1995 and Against All Odds came out a year later, both by Kensington Publishing Corporation, under the Arabesque imprint.

Now, eleven novels and four novellas later (many of them best-sellers and award-winners in the romantic-fiction genre), Johnson-Acsadi says she's still amazed at her success.  "I'm blessed," she says.  "I'm the most surprised person when I realize I have done all these books.  I'm really excited that I can write anything that anybody would publish in fiction," she says, leaning forward in her chair, her face lighting up and her slender fingers gesturing about her gift.  "It's like another present somebody gave me, another life.  I'm very happy that I'm still awed."

Perhaps her sociological background has contributed to her popularity.  Johnson-Acsadi says writing a romance novel requires a certain formula, which she follows.  There must be two main characters around which most of the action revolves.  They have a strong attraction, there's lots of sexual tension, conflict and plenty of love scenes.  But the books must not contain violence (or very little), and each story must have a happy ending.  Johnson-Acsadi follows that formula but adds layers of action and background to give her characters more depth.  "The people that I write about are composites of everybody I know," she explains.  "I'm a social scientist and, even as a demographer, you use sociology all the time."  In Naked Soul, for example, the first chapter includes a flashback into one character's childhood, a traumatic hospital scene in which the family is denied service because they are poor.  That incident causes the heroine to plan her life to avoid poverty at all costs.  The story peels back the layers of the heroine's resolve when she meets her love interest, who she thinks is poor.

Johnson-Acsadi says that, although she has an interracial marriage (she is African-American and her husband is Hungarian), the idea for her first interracial romance, "Against the Wind," came because she didn't like the way she saw men of color being portrayed in other interracial novels, as villains or unsavory people.  "I thought I could write one that was not an exposition on race but in which all of the characters are dignified."  The industry agreed.  Against the Wind was nominated by Romantic Times as the best ethnic romance that year.  The Romance in Color Internet site gave it an Award of Excellence and named Johnson-Acsadi the 1999 Author of the Year.

Not only were readers of all colors attracted to her work, she was pioneering in a genre – romance fiction for the African-American market – that had received very little support from the publishing world.  Up until 1994, African-American writers were told they had to create their characters as white people.  "That was rather insulting," says Johnson-Acsadi.  But, she says, Walter Zacharius, the head of Kensington Publishing, who published her first six novels, told her he had decided to venture into that market because he didn't believe the notion, then prevalent among major publishers: that many African-Americans would not buy and read romance written by and about African-Americans.  Instead he recognized that they were also consumers and they wanted books that portrayed African-American characters who reflected their own accomplishments – as bankers, musicians, business people and other professionals.

Against the advice of colleagues and friends, he published two African-American romance novels a month in 1994.  They sold well and that market has since exploded.  "Now," says Johnson-Acsadi, "every publishing house is clamoring for African-American romance writers."  She continues to write for the Kensington group and is currently at work fulfilling a two-book contract for Dafina, their mainstream fiction line focused on African-Americans.  The first one, When Twilight Comes, will be on bookstands next February.

Johnson-Acsadi's readers continue to buy her books and even people who don't usually read that genre respond.  "I've had letters from people all over the world telling me that something I wrote had changed their life," she says.  One woman, identifying herself as a doctor who doesn't normally read "those" books, wrote that her husband had given her a Johnson-Acsadi book.  The story caused her to look at her own life and make some changes.  Sometimes Johnson-Acsadi hears from the husbands.  "I've gotten letters from men who've told me that, after their wife read a book of mine, they behaved differently towards them."

From her perch high up in that Washington tree years ago, reading and imagining, Johnson-Acsadi did not know the adventure life had in store for her.  But as she expressed that imagination, she enriched the lives of hundreds of thousands of readers.  And although she also acknowledges the valuable work she does with her husband in demographic-studies consultation, Johnson-Acsadi clearly makes a distinction with the romance writing.  "Where else can I have so much fun?"

Gwynne Forster's e-mail address is GwynneF@aol.com.  There's more information at www.gwynneforster.com.