Category: Silver Hammer Award

HWA Presents the 2020 Service Awards

RICHARD LAYMON PRESIDENT’S AWARD

The 2020 Richard Laymon President’s Award winner is Becky Spratford.

Becky Spratford currently serves as HWA’s Secretary and Library Liaison. She has overseen Librarians’ Day during StokerCon from its inception, and also supervises HWA’s Summer Scares program. She also writes the RA for All: Horror blog and wrote the American Library Association’s Readers Advisory Guide to Horror.

“I am very honored to be awarded the Richard Laymon President’s Award. Ironically, in my work on Summer Scares for the HWA, I am usually the one giving others this type of recognition and honestly, I am not sure how to react. Now that the roles are reversed, the work I have done to grow the HWA’s outreach to Libraries, including recruiting library workers to join the organization, growing the reach and scope of Librarians’ Day, and coordinating the Summer Scares Reading Program have given me some of the greatest professional satisfaction of my life. I have also had a lot of fun amidst all the work and made some lifelong friends along the way. Connecting libraries with horror books and authors is fulfilling but seeing how well both the library workers and authors have taken to each other has been inspiring. I am proud to serve the HWA in this way and very humbled to be recognized for it.”

Becky Spratford

SILVER HAMMER AWARD

HWA’s Board of Trustees has voted the 2020 Silver Hammer Award to Carina Bissett and Brian W. Matthews.

Carina Bissett has worked extensively in Colorado to bring to life a new Colorado Springs chapter and has been a tireless supporter of our members. In addition, she’s taken on the responsibility of heading up our HWA Membership Committee and has done an outstanding job.

“I stumbled across the HWA during one of the darkest times in my life. I was on the precipice of succumbing to absolute despair when I received notification that I’d won the HWA Scholarship. That phone call connected on a Wednesday, a long summer night in 2016. I’ll never forget that moment, but it’s what came afterwards that was the real surprise. Not only did the HWA offer me hope, but is also gave me purpose. In my attempt to return a small measure of goodwill, I started volunteering as a jury member, first for the scholarships and then for the Stokers. Later, I added other responsibilities. I took a position on the HWA Membership Committee and another as co-chair of the local chapter in Colorado Springs. I reviewed poetry submissions, supported women writers, and moderated conference panels. And I loved it all. Every single minute I’ve spent volunteering for the HWA has been a minute well spent. It is rewarding work, and I find great joy in contributing to an organization dedicated to providing a safe and creative and compassionate community. There isn’t a day that goes by when I’m not involved in one volunteer task or another. This is a blessing. It is a light that continues to shine in my life, and I don’t need anything more than that.”

Carina Bissett

Brian W. Matthews has risen to the occasion not once, not twice, but three times as a co-chair of HWA’s StokerCons. First, in Grand Rapids and now for both the virtual and in-person conventions celebrating Denver. He has served on the Lifetime Achievement Award Committee, currently serves as a jurist for the Bram Stoker Awards, and for the past several years has organized and run the pitch sessions for StokerCon. In addition to his role as convention co-chair, he also serves as the Bram Stoker Awards Show Coordinator. We would not have been anywhere near as successful without him.

“A friend once told me the HWA is like a family; she called it a fellowship. We pull together to help one another, committing our time and our hearts to making the organization a better place for everyone. That’s the spirit of volunteering. To be recognized with the Silver Hammer Award for outstanding volunteerism is an honor I will cherish forever.”

Brian W. Matthews

MENTOR OF THE YEAR

HWA’s Mentor of the Year Award recipient for 2020 is Angela Yuriko Smith.

HWA Presents the 2019 Service Awards

RICHARD LAYMON PRESIDENT’S AWARD

The 2019 Richard Laymon President’s Award winner is Rena Mason.

Rena Mason is an American author of horror fiction and a three-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award . Her literary debut, The Evolutionist, won the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel in 2013, while her novella East End Girls was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for Best Long Fiction. She has also been awarded HWA’s Silver Hammer Award.

SILVER HAMMER AWARD

HWA’s Board of Trustees has voted the 2019 Silver Hammer Award to Leslie S. Klinger.

Leslie S. Klinger is the New York Times-best-selling editor of the Edgar®-winning New Annotated Sherlock Holmes and the critically-acclaimed New Annotated Dracula and New Annotated Frankenstein, as well as numerous other books and articles on Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, horror, vampires, and the Victorian age. He also edited or co-edited eight anthologies of mysteries, horror, and vampire fiction. His books include the Bram Stoker Award®-nominated four-volume The Annotated Sandman with Neil Gaiman (Vertigo) and The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft, as well as the highly-regarded Watchmen: The Annotated Edition. Klinger currently serves as Treasurer of the Horror Writers Association.

MENTOR OF THE YEAR

HWA’s Mentor of the Year Award recipient for 2019 is Lee Murray.

Lee Murray is a multi-award-winning writer and editor of science fiction, fantasy, and horror (Sir Julius Vogel, Australian Shadows) and a two-time Bram Stoker Award® nominee. Her works include the Taine McKenna military thrillers, and supernatural crime-noir series The Path of Ra, co-written with Dan Rabarts, as well as several books for children. She is proud to have edited thirteen speculative works, including award-winning titles Baby Teeth: Bite Sized Tales of Terror and At the Edge (with Dan Rabarts), Te Kōrero Ahi Kā (with Grace Bridges and Aaron Compton) and Hellhole: An Anthology of Subterranean Terror. She is the co-founder of Young New Zealand Writers, an organisation providing development and publishing opportunities for New Zealand school students, and co-founder of the Wright-Murray Residency for Speculative Fiction Writers. In February 2020, Lee was made an Honorary Literary Fellow in the New Zealand Society of Authors Waitangi Day Honours. Lee lives over the hill from Hobbiton in New Zealand’s sunny Bay of Plenty where she dreams up stories from her office overlooking a cow paddock. Read more at www.leemurray.info. She tweets @leemurraywriter

From Lee:

“I’m so grateful for this unexpected honour from my friends at the Horror Writers Association. To be included on a list with previous Mentor of the Year winners such as Tim Waggoner, Linda Addison, and Greg Faherty, people I admire and adore, well, as the kids say, ‘I can’t even!’ Special thanks must go to my own writing mentors—Jenny Argante, Graeme Lay, Jonathan Maberry, my dad—folk whose quiet belief in me has been both uplifting and humbling. But the truth is, I’ve never escaped a mentorship without learning something, so I’m thankful for the wonderful lessons my HWA colleagues have offered me, for giving me a sneak-peek into their writing processes and the deliciously dark stories they’re conjuring in the twisted shadows of their minds. Mostly, I’m grateful for their fellowship and the lifelong friendships forged through our mentoring partnerships. Because, ultimately, we all get by with a little help from our friends.”

Wetmore, Jr., Kevin J.

Awards:

Silver Hammer Award, 2021

Nominations:

“Jackson and Haunting of the Stage” (Journal of Shirley Jackson Studies Vol. 2 No. 1) (Shirley Jackson Society), Short Non-Fiction, 2024

“A Theatre of Ghosts, A Haunted Cinema: The Japanese Gothic as Theatrical Tradition in Gurozuka” (The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture: Special Issue on Asian Gothic), Short Non-Fiction, 2023

“A Clown in the Living Room: The Sinister Clown on Television” (The Many Lives of Scary Clowns: Essays on Pennywise, Twisty, the Joker, Krusty and More) (McFarland and Company), Short Non-Fiction, 2022

“Devil’s Advocates: The Conjuring” (Auteur Publishing/Liverpool University Press), Short Non-Fiction, 2021

Eaters of the Dead: Myths and Realities of Cannibal Monsters (Reaktion Books), Non-Fiction, 2021

The Streaming of Hill House: Essays on the Haunting Netflix Adaption (McFarland & Co., Inc.), Non-Fiction, 2020

Uncovering Stranger Things: Essays on Eighties Nostalgia, Cynicism and Innocence in the Series (McFarland & Co., Inc.), Non-Fiction, 2018

BIO: Kevin Wetmore is a professor, short fiction writer of over four dozen published short stories, and writer of Post 9/11 Horror in American Cinema, Back from the Dead: Reading Remakes of Romero’s Zombie Films as Markers of their Times, The Theology of Battlestar Galactica, the Devil’s Advocates volume on The Conjuring, and over a hundred book chapters on everything from zombies on stage to Godzilla, to apocalyptic horror.  He is also the editor of over a dozen books, including Uncovering Stranger Things, The Streaming of Hill House, and Theatre and the Macabre. He also works as an actor, director, stage combat choreographer and stand-up comedian. 

Landry, Jess

Awards:

“Mutter” (Fantastic Tales of Terror) (Crystal Lake Publishing), Short Fiction, 2018

2018 Silver Hammer Award

Nominations:

There is No Death, There are No Dead (Crystal Lake Publishing), Anthology, 2021

“I Will Find You, Even in the Dark” (Dim Shores Presents Volume 1, Dim Shores), Long Fiction, 2020

“Bury Me in Tar and Twine” (Tales of the Lost Volume 1: We All Lose Something!) (Things in the Well Publishing), Short Fiction, 2019

BIO: From the day she was born, Jess Landry has always been attracted to the darker things in life. Her fondest childhood memories included getting nightmares from the Goosebumps books, watching The Hilarious House of Frightenstein, and reiterating to her parents that there was absolutely nothing wrong with her mental state.

Since then, Jess’s fiction has appeared in many anthologies, including Twice-Told: A Collection of Doubles, Monsters of Any Kind, Where Nightmares Come From, Lost Highways: Dark Fictions from the Road, and Fantastic Tales of Terror (which features her Bram Stoker Award-nominated short story, “Mutter”), among others.

You can visit her on the interwebs at jesslandry.com, though your best bet at finding her is on Facebook (facebook.com/jesslandry28), where she often posts cat gifs and references Jurassic Park way too much.