Sheree Renée Thomas Wins Hall of Fame Award

The 2022 Darrell Awards Jury is pleased to announce that the 2022 inductee into the Dal Coger Memorial Hall of Fame is Sheree Renée Thomas for her truly extraordinary contributions to literacy in both the Midsouth and the world.

The Hall of Fame Award has been received by Kathleen Ann Goonan, Justin Cronin, Eric Flint, Frank Tuttle, Seanan McGuire, Troy L Wiggins, and over a dozen other worthy authors. Please see our Hall of Fame page for details.

Sheree Renée Thomas

Sheree Renée Thomas is an award-winning fiction writer, poet, and editor.

Her work is inspired by myth and folklore, natural science,  music, and the genius of the Mississippi Delta.

Her fiction collection, Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future (Third Man Books) was a Finalist for the 2021 Ignyte Award, Locus Award, and World Fantasy Award for Year’s Best Collection.

She is also the author of the multigenre / hybrid collections, Sleeping Under the Tree of Life and Shotgun Lullabies (Aqueduct Press).

Thomas’s work is widely anthologized, appearing most recently in The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (1945-2010), The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy vol 2, Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction, and Marvel’s Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda.

She collaborated with Janelle Monáe to contribute “Timebox Altar(ed)” in her short story collection, The Memory Librarian and Other Stories from Dirty Computer (Harper Voyager, April 2022).

She is a co-editor of Trouble the Waters: Tales of the Deep Blue (Third Man Books) with Pan Morigan and Troy L. Wiggins and of Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction (Tordotcom) with Zelda Knight and Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, forthcoming Fall 2022. 

She is the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, founded in 1949, and is the associate editor of Obsidian, founded in 1975.

In 2000 and 2004 she edited the two-time World Fantasy Award-winning groundbreaking anthologies, Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (Grand Central/Hachette). In the Dark Matter anthologies, Thomas first introduced W.E.B. Du Bois’s works as science fiction, and she became the first Black author to be honored with a World Fantasy Award since the award’s inception in 1975.

In 2018, Thomas hosted Black to the Future, Memphis’s first Afrofuturism Festival and she later served on Carnegie Hall’s Curatorial Council for the citywide Afrofuturism Festival to be held in NYC February 3-April 3, 2022. 

In 2021 Thomas was honored as a Special Guest of DisCon III, the 79th World Science Fiction Convention, and co-hosted the Hugo Awards with Andrea Hairston.

In 2022 she is a Guest of Honor at Stokercon, WisCon, and Multiverse.

A former New Yorker, she lives in her hometown, Memphis, Tennessee, near a mighty river and a pyramid.

Follow her @blackpotmojo on Twitter and @shereereneethomas on IG & FB. Visit her website at www.shereereneethomas.com .

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2018 Darrell Awards Now Seeking Nominations

The 2018 Darrell Awards Jury held a meeting tonight and the major piece of business was deciding to seek nominations directly from a broad range of publishers. 

Jury Chairperson Kitty Jungkind will contact both national and regional publishers of science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels and novellas to seek nominations of eligible works either written by Mid-South authors or with scenes set in the Mid-South. 

Jury Vice-Chair Sylvia Cox will contact publishers of magazines and short stories.

As always, the Jury is happy to accept nominations from the public,  as well as the authors, publishers,  and friends of the authors. 

The 2018 Nomination Form is now available here in multiple formats. Please see the Nomination Form for eligibility and other rules. 

The deadline for nominations is now set as December 1, 2017 (one month earlier than in previous years). 

 

Nominations are NOW OPEN for the 2018 Darrell Awards

The Darrell Awards Jury is pleased to announce that Nominations are now open for the 2018 Darrell Awards.

This year, we are accepting nominations for Best Midsouth Novel, Novella, and Short Story, as well as Young Adult works and the Dal Coger Memorial Hall of Fame Award.

In order to be considered, the work must be published no later than October 31, 2017, and nominated no later than December 1, 2017.

PLEASE NOTE: the Nomination Deadline is one month earlier than it has been, mostly because MidSouthCon will be held almost a month earlier than usual in 2018. The Darrell Awards are presented at the Banquet at MidSouthCon, so when that event is held earlier, we have to adjust our deadlines.

This also means that we will turn in a list of Finalists sooner. Look for that Finalists List to be available by February 1, 2018.

Young Adult Works will be considered for two years. So, if it is otherwise eligible and is a Young Adult work, you can nominate it —  if it was published between November 1, 2015, and October 31, 2017.

For Novels, Novellas, and Short Stories, we are looking at just one year (as usual) — November 1 of 2016 to October 31 of 2017.

The Hall of Fame Award is for a work or works that were not considered during their year(s) of eligibility. So, there are no publication deadlines for the Hall of Fame Award — just the Nomination Deadline, which applies to everything.

All works must be nominated by December 1, 2017, or they will not be considered for the 2018 Darrell Awards or the Hall of Fame Award.

Also, please note that we have a new Chairperson, so the addresses to send your nominations and your nominated works have changed. The new addresses are on the Nomination Form.

You can find the 2018 Darrell Awards Nomination Form in multiple formats here: 2018 Darrell Awards Nominations Forms.

Please see the Rules attached to the Nomination Form, as we have added a new Rule at the end to state how we will handle the plaques and the certificates that have been a mainstay of the Awards Presentation at the Banquet for the 20+ years of these Awards.

The new Deadlines are also stated in the Rules, which go into detail about what does and what does not qualify for consideration.

We look forward to receiving your nominations and to considering your Midsouth SF/F/H.

2017 Best Novel plaque