The Horror Writers Association (HWA) has announced three of their non-voted awards. The awards ceremony will take place during the Bram Stoker Awards Banquet in New Orleans on 15 June 2013, during this year’s World Horror Convention.
The winner of the Specialty Press Award is Centipede Press, of Lakewood, Colorado. This award “recognizes a publisher outside the mainstream New York City publishing community that specializes in dark-themed fiction. Winners are typically small presses specializing in limited editions, small print runs, or the work of new and relatively unknown authors. The winner of the award is determined by a majority vote of the HWA Board of Trustees.”
Jerad Walters’ Centipede Press started in 2001 and specializes in horror, crime and science fiction, as well as art books, career retrospectives, and critical studies on horror films. Authors they’ve published include Stephen King, Thomas Ligotti, H.P. Lovecraft, Patrick McGrath, Jim Thompson and Cornell Woolrich. Centipede Press titles strive to be excellent examples of bookmaking, with superior design, page layout, and dust jackets. For more information about Centipede Press, please visit http://centipedepress.com.
The Silver Hammer Award is being awarded to Charles Day. The Hammer Award is given periodically to an HWA volunteer who has “done a truly massive amount of work for the organization, often unsung and behind the scenes. It was instituted in 1996, and is decided by a vote of HWA’s Board of Trustees.”
Day is the Chair of HWA’s Mentor Committee. “Charles has done an outstanding job relaunching that program, so that it now has a record number of both mentors and mentees. He has done so with his trademark commitment and good humor.”
HWA’s Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Marge Simon, commented, “The HWA is a success because of the tremendous workload carried by our many volunteers, mostly unnoticed. Charles is an exemplar of these efforts, and the Board is pleased to recognize him.”
The Richard Laymon President’s Award for Service was instituted in 2000 and is named in honor of Richard Laymon, who died in 2000 while serving as HWA’s President. As its name implies, it is given by HWA’s sitting President. The award is presented to a volunteer who has served HWA in an especially exemplary manner and has shown extraordinary dedication to the organization.
HWA’s current President, Rocky Wood, has chosen James Chambers to receive the Richard Laymon Award, saying “Jim stepped up a couple of years ago to Chair the Membership Committee. Since then he has completely revamped the Committee, bringing in and documenting processes, training people to assist, overviewing our Outreach program and welcoming hundreds of new members. In addition he conceived of and implemented the Halloween Haunts blog program, which has become a staple of our public blog each October. It is contributors like Jim who represent all that is good about HWA’s all-volunteer structure.”