The 2025 Lifetime Achievement Awards

Jonathan Maberry, having begun his writing career as a journalist specializing in martial arts, is a prolific horror author, an inspiring editor, a playwright, a teacher, a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and graphic novels, and a mentor of emerging authors. He is a six-time Bram Stoker Award winner, among many other awards. Transitioning from martial arts to horror, Maberry wrote a number of creative nonfiction works on the supernatural, including The Vampire Slayers Field Guide to the Undead; Vampire Universe: The Dark World of Supernatural Beings That Haunt Us, Hunt Us and Hunger for Us, the Stoker Award-winning The Cryptopedia, co-authored by David F. Kramer,and Zombie CSU: The Forensics of the Living Dead, among others.His novels include the Pine Deep Trilogy (Ghost Road Blues, Dead Man’s Song, and Bad Moon Rising), the Dead of Night Series (Dead of Night, Fall of Night, Dark of Night, and Still of Night), his YA series “Rot and Ruin” (Rot & Ruin, Flesh & Bone, Dust & Decay, Fire & Ash, Bits & Pieces, Broken Lands, and Lost Roads), the fourteen-volume and counting Joe Ledger series (featuring such novels as Patient Zero, The King of Plagues, Dogs of War, Deep Silence, Rage, Cave 13, and many more), The Wolfman, Indigo, Ink, Mars One, Ghostwalkers,and Glimpse. The author of hundreds of short stories, his fiction collections include Joe Ledger: The Missing Files, Tales from the Fire Zone, Darkness on the Edge of Town: Pine Deep Stories, A Wind Through the Fence, A Little Bronze Book of Cautionary Tales, and Midnight Lullabies: Unquiet Stories and Poems. He has also edited fifteen anthologies, including the Stoker-nominated Nights of the Living Dead with George Romero and the HWA anthologies New Scary Stories to Tell in the Darkand Don’t Turn Out the Lights. As a freelance comic writer, he has written for Marvel Comics and IDW Publishing, including adaptations of his own V-Wars series and Rot & Ruin. He also executive produced an adaptation of his V-Wars series for Netflix. Maberry is also the editor of Weird Tales magazine. He is a seemingly inexhaustible writer, mentor, editor, advocate, and leader within the horror community (as well as several other genres). We celebrate his work and his contributions to the community.

Lisa Morton, the Queen of Halloween, is a screenwriter, author, and editor whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening.” A former vice president and multi-term president of the Horror Writers Association, she is a six-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award®, the author of four novels, four collections, eight works of non-fiction, and over 200 short stories, and a world-class Halloween and paranormal expert who has appeared on CNN, NPR, The History Channel, Discovery +, and dozens of other sites and shows. Her novels include Malediction, The Castle of Los Angeles, Netherworld, and Zombie Apocalypse!: Washington Deceased. Her nonfiction works are on a variety of topics, and include such books as The Halloween Encyclopedia, Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween, Ghosts: A Haunted History, The Art of the Zombie Movie, and a forthcoming volume on the history of demon possession. Her collections include Monsters of L.A., Cemetery Dance Select: Lisa Morton, The Samhanach and Other Halloween Treats, and recently In the Shadow of Halloween, a collection of her uncollected Halloween stories. As an editor she has edited such books as A Hallowe’en Anthology: Literary and Historical Writings Over the Centuries, and co-edited the two volume Weird Women collections and Ghost Stories: Classic Tales of Horror and Suspense, both with Leslie S. Klinger, as well as the HWA anthology Haunted Nights (co-edited with Ellen Datlow).

The Lifetime Achievement Award committee also noted her dedication to the community and to other writers, citing her long service to the organization and the creation of StokerCon under her leadership, as well as her mentoring and guiding emerging writers in the field. She also hosts the popular weekly “Ghost Report” podcast and a newsletter about the paranormal (The Whole Haunted World). Lisa lives in Los Angeles and online at www.lisamorton.com. The HWA is proud to celebrate her work as an author, her contributions to the organization and the community, and her Halloween spirit.