In the course of her short life, Shirley Jackson experienced prejudice in a number of forms: against her gender, against her body type, against her husband’s ethnicity. Her keen awareness of the prejudices that bedeviled the mid-century United States informs her fiction, from the ritualized brutality portrayed in “The Lottery” to the mental health struggles of the protagonists of Hangsaman and The Bird’s Nest, to the communal suspicion and violence on display in We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
Sadly, the prejudices that were part of Shirley Jackson’s world have not left us. Indeed, in recent times, they have shown themselves as powerful as ever. Faced with so much evidence of continuing evil, it is tempting to succumb to hopelessness, to fatalism. Yet such moments are exactly when it is most important to lift our voices against the injustice that kills young people of color in the street and in their beds, that sees members of the LGBTQ community brutalized and brutally murdered, that forces the economically vulnerable to have to choose between poverty-level wages and their health, that continues to refuse women the dignity of their own health choices.
With this in mind, the Board of Directors of the Shirley Jackson Award supports and stands in solidarity with the organizations at work at this moment to counter the prejudices that poison American society, from Black Lives Matter, to the LGBTQ Freedom Fund, to the Southern Poverty Law Center, to Planned Parenthood, to the many, many more seeking to affect positive change. As a first step in this continuing process, the Board of Directors pledges to add persons of color to both the Board of Directors and Board of Advisors within the next year.
We understand that the scope of our award is limited, but we want to stand up and be counted—or, to borrow an image from Shirley Jackson’s most famous story, to encourage people to drop their stones, wipe their palms, and hold out their hands to their neighbors.
An excerpt of this statement was included in the 2019 Shirley Jackson Awards ceremony, which premiered on July 12, 2020.
Websites: ShirleyJacksonAwards.org
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For further information, contact JoAnn F. Cox, Administrator, at Admin@shirleyjacksonawards.org.