JURORS

In recognition of the legacy of Shirley Jackson’s writing, and with permission of the author’s estate, the Shirley Jackson Awards have been established for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic. The Shirley Jackson Awards are voted upon by a jury of professional writers, editors, critics, and academics, with input from a Board of Advisors. The awards are given for the best work published in the preceding calendar year in the following categories: Novel, Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Single-Author Collection, and Edited Anthology. The jurors for the 2023 Shirley Jackson Awards are, alphabetically:

Bill Campbell is the author of Sunshine Patriots, the anti-racism satire, Koontown Killing Kaper, as well as the graphic novels, Baaaad Muthaz, The Day the Klan Came to Town, and Refuge. Along with Edward Austin Hall, he co-edited the groundbreaking anthology, Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond. He also co-edited Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany with Nisi Shawl, Future Fiction: New Dimensions in International Science Fiction and Fantasy with Francesco Verso, and APB: Artists against Police Brutality with Jason Rodriguez and John Jennings. In 2016, Campbell won the Glyph Lifetime Achievement/Pioneer Award for his contributions in Black comics. In 2021, he won the Locus Award for Amplifying Marginalized Voices. Campbell lives in Washington, DC, where he spends his time with his family and helms Rosarium Publishing.

Gwendolyn Kiste is the three-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Rust Maidens, Reluctant Immortals, Boneset & Feathers, And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe, Pretty Marys All in a Row, and The Invention of Ghosts. Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Nightmare Magazine, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Vastarien, Tor’s Nightfire, Black Static, The Dark, Daily Science Fiction, Interzone, and LampLight, among others. Originally from Ohio, she now resides on an abandoned horse farm outside of Pittsburgh with her husband, their excitable calico cat, and not nearly enough ghosts. Find her online at gwendolynkiste.com.

 Will Ludwigsen’s stories of strange mystery have appeared in eclectic venues like Asimov’s Science Fiction, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Weird Tales, Nightmare Magazine, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, among many places. His collection In Search Of and Others was nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award. Will lives and writes in Jacksonville, Florida, with his partner Aimee Payne, also a writer. When he isn’t reconciling the eerie with the absurd as a marketing writer at work, he’s doing it for you in his fiction. His novella A Scout is Brave is forthcoming in July 2024 from Lethe Press.

Anya Martin was weaned on Friday Night Frights, has always rooted for the monster, and regrets abandoning her earliest career aspiration—digging for dinosaurs. Her debut collection, the critically acclaimed Weird horror spec-lit collection, Sleeping with the Monster, was published by Lethe Press. Her novella Grass, originally a Dim Shores limited edition chapbook, has been translated in Spanish by Dilatando Mentes Editorial (as Hierba) and in Czech by Medusa Press (as Tráva). Her most recent story “The Other Cat” is in Looming Low II (Dim Shores), and her fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines. She co-produces/co-hosts The Outer Dark podcast and symposium, spotlighting a diverse spectrum of contemporary Weird/spec-lit creators, with Scott Nicolay for This Is Horror. Her author website is www.anyamartin.com.

Eden Royce is a Shirley Jackson Award nominee and her short stories have appeared in a variety of print and online publications. She has also written articles for Writer’s Digest, The Horn Book Magazine, Western Colorado University, and We Need Diverse Books. Her debut novel, Root Magic, is a Walter Dean Myers Award Honoree, an Andre Norton Nebula Award Finalist, an Ignyte Award winner, and a Mythopoeic Fantasy Award winner for outstanding children’s literature. Find her online at edenroyce.com.

ADVISORY BOARD

The Board of Advisors is one of the most valuable assets of the Shirley Jackson Awards. Members of the Board offer advice regarding general matters connected with the awards and, most crucially, recommend works for SJA consideration. In so doing, they provide vital support to the mission of the jurors: to read as deeply and widely as possible within the ever-widening borders of dark fiction. However, advisors may only recommend works to the jurors. Advisors do not nominate, vote on, tabulate, or otherwise administer the awards. Accordingly, works by members of the Board of Advisors are eligible for consideration for the awards.

Ellen Datlow has been editing science fiction, fantasy, and horror short fiction for over thirty-five years as fiction editor of OMNI Magazine and editor of Event Horizon and SCIFICTION. She currently acquires short fiction for Tor.com. In addition, she has edited more than ninety science fiction, fantasy, and horror anthologies, including the annual The Best Horror of the Year, The Doll Collection, Children of Lovecraft, Nightmares: A New Decade of Modern Horror, Black Feathers, Haunted Nights: A Horror Writers Association anthology (with Lisa Morton), and Mad Hatters and March Hares.  Forthcoming are The Devil and the Deep: Horror Stories of the Sea and Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories.

She’s won multiple World Fantasy Awards, Locus Awards, Hugo Awards, Stoker Awards, International Horror Guild Awards, Shirley Jackson Awards, and the 2012 Il Posto Nero Black Spot Award for Excellence as Best Foreign Editor. Datlow was named recipient of the 2007 Karl Edward Wagner Award, given at the British Fantasy Convention for “outstanding contribution to the genre,” was honored with the Life Achievement Award by the Horror Writers Association, in acknowledgment of superior achievement over an entire career, and honored with the World Fantasy Life Achievement Award at the 2014 World Fantasy Convention.

She lives in New York and co-hosts the monthly Fantastic Fiction Reading Series at KGB Bar. More information can be found at www.datlow.com, on Facebook, and on twitter as @EllenDatlow.

Liz Hand is the author of many novels, including Winterlong, Waking the Moon (Tiptree and Mythopoeic Award-winner), Glimmering, Mortal Love, and Generation Loss, and three collections of stories, most recently Saffron and Brimstone. She has also been awarded a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship. A regular contributor to the Washington Post and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.Hand lives with her family on the Maine Coast. www.elizabethhand.com

John Langan is one of the co-founders of the Shirley Jackson Awards. He is the author of two novels and five collections of short fiction. For his work, he has received the Bram Stoker and This Is Horror Awards. He lives in New York’s Mid-Hudson valley with his family.

Sarah Langan‘s an award-winning novelist and screenwriter. Her most recent novel, Good Neighbors (S&S 2021), was a B&N Book of the Month selection, an Amazon readers’ choice, an Apple must-listen, a Newsweek, Irish Times, and AARP best book of the year, and according to Gabino Iglesias at NPR, is “One of the creepiest, most unnerving deconstructions of American suburbia I’ve ever read.” She’s won three Bram Stoker Awards, and her previous novels are The Keeper, The Missing, and Audrey’s Door. She has an MFA from Columbia University, an MS in Environmental Toxicology from NYU, and lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the writer/director JT Petty, their two daughters, a tarantula, and a maniac rabbit. Her next novel, A Better World, will be published in Spring, 2024. www.sarahlangan.com

Stewart O’Nan is the author of eleven novels, including Snow Angels, The Speed Queen, A Prayer for the Dying and The Night Country.

Faye Ringel is Professor Emerita of Humanities, U.S. Coast Guard Academy, New London CT. She is the author of New England’s Gothic Literature: History and Folklore of the Supernatural (E. Mellen, 1995) and The Gothic Literature and History of New England: Secrets of the Restless Dead, (Anthem 2022). She contributed chapters to The Cambridge Companion to American Gothic (Weinstock, ed. 2017) and to A Companion to American Gothic (Crow, ed. 2013) as well as many other reference books. She has also given papers and published on (among other subjects) New England vampires, Lovecraft, Tolkien, Yiddish folklore—and of course Shirley Jackson. She has been a program participant at conventions devoted to science fiction, fantasy, and horror since the late 1970s. She contributed an essay to the program book of Readercon 23 (2012), at which Shirley Jackson was Memorial Guest of Honor. She has twice been an invited speaker at the Trinity College Dublin Reading Shirley Jackson in the 21st Century online symposium.

Becky Spratford [MLIS] is a librarian and educator in Illinois specializing in serving leisure readers ages 13 and up. She trains library staff all over the world on how to match books with readers through the local public library. She runs the critically acclaimed website RA for All, is under contract to provide content for EBSCO’s NoveList database and writes reviews for Booklist and a Horror review column for Library Journal. Known for her work with horror readers, Becky is the author of three books about the genre, most recently, The Reader’s Advisory Guide to Horror, Third Edition [ALA Editions, 2021]. She is a proud member of the Horror Writers Association, was a Guest of Honor at StokerCon 2017, and received the HWA’s 2020 Richard Laymon President’s Award for Service. She currently serves as the Association’s Secretary and co-organizer of their annual Librarians’ Day and Summer Scares Reading Program. Follow Becky on Twitter @RAforAll.

Paul Tremblay has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and Massachusetts Book awards and is the author of The Pallbearers Club, Survivor Song, Growing Things and Other Stories, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, and the crime novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland. His novel The Cabin at the End of the World was adapted into the major motion picture Knock at the Cabin. He lives outside Boston with his family.

Ann VanderMeer is the founder of the award-winning Buzzcity Press and currently serves as the fiction editor for Weird Tales, the oldest fantasy magazine in the world. Work from her press has won the British Fantasy Award, the International Rhysling Award, the IHG Award, and appeared in several year’s best anthologies. Ann has partnered with her husband, author Jeff VanderMeer, on such editing projects as the World Fantasy Award winning Leviathan series and The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases.A guest editor for Best American Fantasy, she is currently co-editing the following anthologies: The New Weird, Steampunk, Fast Ships, Black Sails, Last Drink Bird Head, and Love-Drunk Book Heads. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer live in Tallahassee, Florida. www.weirdtalesmagazine.net.

Kaaron Warren published her first short story in 1993 and has had stories in print every year since. Her stories have appeared in Australia, the US, China, the UK, and elsewhere in Europe, and have been selected for both Ellen Datlow’s and Paula Guran’s Best of the Year Anthologies. Kaaron has lived in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Fiji. She has published four novels (Slights, Walking the Tree, Mistification,and The Grief Hole) and six short story collections, including the multi-award winning Through Splintered Walls. Her next short story collection is A Primer to Kaaron Warren from Dark Moon Books.

Her novella “Sky” from that collection won the Shirley Jackson Award and was shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award. It went on to win all three of the Australian genre awards, while The Grief Hole did the same thing in 2017. Her next novel is Tide of Stone, from Omnium Gatherum. Kaaron was a Fellow at the Museum for Australian Democracy, where she researched prime ministers, artists and serial killers. In 2018 she will be Established Artist in Residence at Katharine Susannah Prichard House in Western Australia. She’s taught workshops in haunted asylums, old morgues and second hand clothing shops and she’s mentored several writers through a number of programs.

She was Guest of Honour at the World Fantasy Convention in 2018, New Zealand’s Lexicon in 2019, and Stokercon 2019. You can find her at http://kaaronwarren.wordpress.com/ and she Tweets @KaaronWarren

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Linda D. Addison is the author of five award-winning collections, including The Place of Broken Things written with Alessandro Manzetti, & How To Recognize A Demon Has Become Your Friend. She is the recipient of the HWA Lifetime Achievement Award and SFPA Grand Master of Fantastic Poetry.

F. Brett Cox is President of the SJA Board of Directors and was one of the award’s founding jurors. His fiction, poetry, essays, reviews, and dramatic works have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. Recent publications include fiction in See the Elephant and the anthology War Stories, poetry in IthicaLit, The Lake, and Exit 13, and a monologue in the anthology Geek Theater. His short story “Maria Works at Ocean City Nails,” originally published in New Haven Review, was included in Best Indie Lit New England Vol. 2. With Andy Duncan, he co-edited the anthology Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic. A native of North Carolina, Brett is Professor of English at Norwich University and lives in Vermont with his wife, playwright Jeanne Beckwith.

JoAnn Cox

Jack Haringa is a writer, editor, critic, and former teacher of speculative and dark fantastic literature. With S.T. Joshi he co-founded and was editor of Dead Reckonings, a review journal of horror, dark fantasy, and the weird published by Hippocampus Press.

Victor LaValle is the author of seven works of fiction and one comic book, Destroyer, which was the recipient of the Bram Stoker Award for Graphic Novel.

Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of non-fiction books, and prose writer whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening.” She is a six-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award®, the author of four novels and over 150 short stories, and a world-class Halloween and paranormal expert. Her recent releases include the novella Halloween Beyond – The Talking- board, Haunted Tales: Classic Stories of Ghosts and the Supernatural (co-edited with Leslie S. Klinger), Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances, and The Art of the Zombie Movie. Lisa lives in Los Angeles and online at www.lisamorton.com.

Administrator

JoAnn Cox

Webmaster

Matthew Kressel, in addition to his writing pursuits, designs websites for many prominent authors and organizations, including Columbia University, Stanford University, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Genevieve Valentine, Nicholas Kaufmann, N. Griffin, & many others.  Contact him here.