News & Blog

It’s about time! The HWA has announced its annual Specialty Press Award will go to ChiZine Publications, publisher of my 2010 novella Chasing the Dragon (above), as well as lots of other great, dark, weird novels, novellas, collections, and anthologies!

According to the press release, which you can read in full here:

“Among the many small presses publishing dark fiction, ChiZine Publications stood out this year with its list of impressive releases and continued dedication to the horror genre,” said Marge Simon, HWA’s Board of Trustees Chairperson.

ChiZine Publications (CZP) sprang out of the successful chizine.com, which began presenting fiction and review in 1997. Since its inception in 2008, CZP has published more than 90 books by authors including Christopher Golden, Stephen Graham Jones, Gemma Files, Tim Lebbon, Nancy Baker, Tom Piccirilli, Helen Marshall, Michael Rowe, Geoff Ryman, Robert Shearman, Melanie Tem and Steve Rasnic Tem. Their philosophy is “to startle, to astound, to share the bliss of good writing with our readership.”

The award will be presented May 9 during the Bram Stoker Awards Banquet in Atlanta, Georgia, as part of the World Horror Convention. Big congratulations to CZP masterminds Brett Savory and Sandra Kasturi! This kind of recognition is a long time coming!

To find out more about ChiZine Publications, visit their website.

To find out more about my Thriller Award- and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated novella Chasing the Dragon, one of the first books ChiZine published, check out its page on my website.

Yesterday, the Horror Writers Association (HWA) announced a new scholarship in honor of Rocky Wood, the organization’s late president, who passed away on December 1st as a result of complications from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

From the HWA’s press release:

The new scholarship, which joins the existing Horror Writers Association and Mary Shelley Scholarships, will focus on non-fiction. Rocky Wood, a two-time recipient of the Bram Stoker Award®, was best known for his extensive work involving the writings of Stephen King. The scholarship was proposed by HWA Treasurer Leslie Klinger, who will also oversee its implementation.

You can read the rest of the press release here, which also details who will be succeeding Wood for the rest of his term.

That’s all the information I’ve heard about the scholarship so far. I assume they’re still hammering out all the details. But I think the scholarship is a grand idea, not just to commemorate Wood, who was probably the most effective and forward-thinking president the HWA has had in quite some time, but also because of its focus on non-fiction, which I feel doesn’t get as much attention as fiction by the organization’s members. (The Outstanding Non-Fiction category of the Bram Stoker Awards is routinely filled with works by other HWA members, despite the hundreds if not thousands of eligible non-fiction books published every year, which to me is an indication that the membership doesn’t read much non-fiction in general.) The scholarship may not change how the award too often goes to another HWA member, but it just might raise non-fiction’s visibility among the membership, which can only be a good thing.

The nominees for the 2013 Shirley Jackson Awards have been announced, and I must say, the list looks fantastic! Longtime readers know I’ve been a strong proponent of the Shirley Jackson Awards since its inception. I even edited a special fundraiser anthology for them. Because they are a fully juried award, and the jurors tend to be respected authors and editors in the field, the Shirley Jackson Awards tend to display a lot more sophistication and taste — and a lot less cronyism — in their choice of nominees and winners than some other horror-based literary awards do. Such an approach leads to selections of real quality, and this year’s list of nominees is no exception. Behold!

NOVEL

• The Accursed, Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco)
• American Elsewhere, Robert Jackson Bennett (Orbit)
• The Demonologist, Andrew Pyper (Orion-UK/ Simon & Schuster-US)
• The Ghost Bride, Yangsze Choo (William Morrow)
• Night Film, Marisha Pessl (Random House)
• Wild Fell, Michael Rowe (ChiZine Publications)

NOVELLA

• Burning Girls, Veronica Schanoes (Tor.com)
• Children of No One, Nicole Cushing (DarkFuse)
• Helen’s Story, Rosanne Rabinowitz (PS Publishing)
• It Sustains, Mark Morris (Earthling Publications)
• “The Gateway,” Nina Allan (Stardust, PS Publishing)
• The Last Revelation of Gla’aki, Ramsey Campbell (PS Publishing)
• Whom the Gods Would Destroy, Brian Hodge (DarkFuse)

NOVELETTE

• Cry Murder! In a Small Voice, Greer Gilman (Small Beer Press)
• “A Little of the Night,” Tanith Lee (Clockwork Phoenix 4, Mythic Delirium Books)
• “My Heart is Either Broken,” Megan Abbott (Dangerous Women, Tor Books)
• “Phosphorus,” Veronica Schanoes (Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells: An Anthology of Gaslamp Fantasy, Tor Books)
• “Raptors,” Conrad Williams (Subterranean Press Magazine, Winter 2013)

SHORT FICTION

• “57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides,” Sam J. Miller (Nightmare Magazine, December 2013)
• “Furnace,” Livia Llewellyn (Grimscribe’s Puppets, Miskatonic River Press)
• “The Memory Book,” Maureen McHugh (Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells: An Anthology of Gaslamp Fantasy, Tor Books)
• “The Statue in the Garden,” Paul Park (Exotic Gothic 5, PS Publishing)
• “That Tiny Flutter of the Heart,” Robert Shearman (Psycho-Mania!, Constable & Robinson)
• “The Traditional,” Maria Dahvana Headley (Lightspeed, May 2013)

SINGLE-AUTHOR COLLECTION

• Before and Afterlives, Christopher Barzak (Lethe Press)
• Everything You Need, Michael Marshall Smith (Earthling Publications)
• In Search of and Others, Will Ludwigsen (Lethe Press)
• North American Lake Monsters, Nathan Ballingrud (Small Beer Press)
• The Story Until Now, Kit Reed (Wesleyan)

EDITED ANTHOLOGY

• The Book of the Dead, edited by Jared Shurin (Jurassic London)
• End of the Road, Jonathan Oliver (Solaris)
• Grimscribe’s Puppets, edited by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. (Miskatonic River Press)
• Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells: An Anthology of Gaslamp Fantasy, edited by Ellen Datlow (Tor Books)
• Where thy Dark Eye Glances: Queering Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Steve Berman (Lethe Press)

The 2013 Shirley Jackson Awards will be presented at a ceremony on Sunday, July 13th at Readercon 25. Congrats and good luck to all the nominees! (But especially to my good friends Robert Jackson Bennett, Veronica Schanoes [twice over!], Livia Llewellyn, Robert Shearman, and Nathan Ballingrud!)

The following press release from the Horror Writers Association (HWA) is about something I think is pretty cool. In fact, I’m tempted to call it the coolest thing the HWA has done in a long time. If I had one suggestion, though, I’d recommend opening the scholarship up to promising female writers outside the HWA, too. Then, if the winner turns out to not be a member of the HWA already, they could be awarded the scholarship as well as one year’s free membership.

——

Starting from 2014 the Horror Writers Association (HWA) has instituted the Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Scholarship, open to female writers who are members of the HWA. The Scholarship is designed to address the unseen, but real, barriers limiting the amount of horror fiction being published by women.

The first Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Scholarship has been awarded to Erinn Kemper, a Canadian writer who resides in Costa Rica. Erinn Kemper (E. L. Kemper) grew up in an isolated mill town in coastal British Columbia, Canada. From there she moved to the city to study Philosophy at the University of Victoria. Over the years she’s worked as an eye glasses repair person, a fish farmer, a cabinet maker, a parks department laborer, a book store clerk, a home nurse, a teacher—and lived in a camper, in Japan and on a forty foot wooden sailboat. She now lives in a small town in Costa Rica on the Caribbean Sea where she plans to write her first novel from her hammock.

Erinn has sold stories to Cemetery Dance Magazine and [Nameless] Digest and appears in various anthologies including A Darke Phantastique and Chiral Mad 2. Visit her website at erinnkemper.com for updates and sloth sightings.

Erinn said, “I am honored and thrilled to be chosen to receive The Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Scholarship. I appreciate the opportunity to take some writing courses for the first time and to challenge myself to dig deeper and darker. It’s a wonderful thing that the HWA supports writers and invests in the future of the genre through mentoring and now with these scholarships! When it’s my turn I can’t wait to give back by offering my support as a mentor.”

HWA President Rocky Wood said, “We are proud to be the first genre writers’ organisation to present a scholarship specifically targeted to support the development of female authors.”

About the HWA

The Horror Writers Association is a worldwide organization promoting dark literature and its creators. It has over 1200 members who write, edit and publish professionally in fiction, nonfiction, videogames, films, comics, and other media. For more information about the HWA visit www.horror.org. Media inquiries to president@horror.org.