Donna's Picture.

Smart is Sexy


Writing to arouse your mind



Welcome to my web site! Here you can find out more about my work, both literary and erotic. This site is for readers ages 18 and over. If you are under 18 and are interested in teenage-appropriate information, click on over to Scarleteen.

In the age of so many brave people coming forward to share their #MeToo and #LivingWhileBlack stories, I have come to better understand the importance of speaking the truth about my experience living in a female body in our culture, especially when those in power might be made uncomfortable by those truths. My publications range in theme from a personal exposé of the deadly results of pharmaceutical companies putting profit over human life (“A Pill to Change Your Life”) to an exploration of an American’s love affair with Japan (Amorous Woman.)

Occasionally I’m asked why I write erotica, when I could write “real” literature. For me, the erotic experience is one of the most challenging and important parts of human existence to capture in prose. I believe we need more writers willing to acknowledge that the erotic imagination is worthy of intelligent literary treatment. Even in the twenty-first century, an honest portrayal of our private experiences, whatever our gender, is still shamed and silenced by many in power. Meanwhile our culture unthinkingly applauds depictions of violence and cruelty, as well as the objectification of women in the service of male desire.

More of us need to speak our truths. We all will learn by listening.

This is what I try to do with my writing—one story, essay and novel at a time.

Here on my site, you can read more about my erotic novel, Amorous Woman, which is now availlable as an ebook You can also learn about my other publications in print and online—nearly two hundred stories and essays that have appeared in journals from The Gettysburg Review to Best American Erotica. 

Six of my favorite stories, which have all appeared in the annual Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica series, have been collected in one convenient ebook: The Mammoth Book of Erotica Presents the Best of Donna George Storey: Picture Perfect.

My “Aural Pleasures” page includes several radio interviews from the literary to the steamy and my reading of my essay “Thirteen Views of Grief” about my father's death on KQED’s “Writer’s Block,” which is part of a library of readings by such literary luminaries Paul Auster, Jennifer Egan, and George Saunders.

I write a monthly column at the Erotica Readers and Writers Association blog, so check it out if you are interesting in the writer’s craft, the history of sexuality and gender in America, and sexual politics.

I also post occasionally at my own my blog “Sex, Food, and Writing”

Amorous Woman

“And so I told him how living in Japan would give him a leisure no mere tourist has, to know the rhythms of the place, a land of tiny poems. In autumn, he’d see the persimmons glowing like huge, orange jewels on their bare branches, then winter’s dusting of snow on blue tile roofs. He’d learn why the old erotic pictures are called “spring prints” — because in that season the air is as soft as a lover’s whisper––and he’d sigh at the perfect coolness of iced barley tea slipping down his throat on a wilting summer afternoon. As the year passed, he would become part of it. The neighbors would stop staring and start to nod a greeting, and one day the tiny old lady in the gray kimono at the snack stand would wrap up his regular order of red-bean-and-rice balls before a word was spoken, and she’d flash him that first gold-toothed smile, and he’d be happy all day. It’s like someone’s given you a whole other life, I told him, an extra life, to live for a while.”