Following up last week’s announcement, the Board of Trustees of the Horror Writers Association yesterday announced the recipient of this year’s Silver Hammer Award: Kathryn Ptacek. The award is given “periodically to an HWA volunteer who has done a truly massive amount of work for our organization, often unsung and behind the scenes. It was instituted in 1996, and is decided by a vote of HWA’s Board of Trustees.”
The Silver Hammer Award is so named because “it represents the careful, steady, continuous work of building HWA’s ‘house’—the many institutional systems that keep the organization functioning on a day-to-day basis. The award itself is a chrome-plated hammer with an engraved plaque on the handle. The chrome hammer is also a satisfying allusion to The Beatles’ song, ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, a miniature horror story in itself.”
Ptacek has been HWA’s newsletter editor for the last decade, overseeing a staff of writers and proofreaders to produce the organization’s informative and entertaining monthly newsletter. She is also the author of horror, fantasy, and romance novels, the editor of the Women of Darkness anthologies, and was a 1989 Bram Stoker Award nominee for her short story “Each Night, Each Year”. She also publishes and edits Gila Queen’s Guide to Markets.