StokerCon Recap including Book Buzz and Awards

From June15-18 I was at StokerCon 2023 in Pittsburgh. Please check my twitter feed during those days (if this is way after the time, you can do an advanced search for my profile during those dates for much much more.)

You can also use the #StokerCon2023 thread to uncover a lot more.

During the event, I was part of the team that ran Librarians' Day on Friday. 

Below I have links to info about each panel with lots of resources.

First, take a look at all of these ARCs and swag the publishers sent us to give away. Thanks to Konrad Stump for organizing the. Here are some photos of the happy authors and library workers (and Clay McLeod Chapman with his stack of books for the library folks)

Click here for the thread for "Buzzing About Horror Books," moderated by Emily Vinci. That thread has every tile and the publisher info. Lila Denning (@vantine) did retweets with the appeal language to each of my tweets of the slides. To access those, on each individual tweet (1 per book/slide) click on "Quotes" on the bottom left corner of the Tweet and her appeal language will come up. Huge shout out to Lila for the assist. Here is an example:

Click here for the thread for "How to Feature Horror at Your Library," moderate by Konrad Stump with contact info for all of the presenters. Some excellent ideas to promote horror here.

Click here for the thread for the Librarians' Day Guest of Honor Panel moderated by Lila Denning.

We hosted a guided brainstorming session, organized by Konrad Stump. This was for in person attendees only but I caught a great picture of it happening.

Then we switched rooms so the mass author signing could be set up. And Ben Rubin from The University of Pittsburgh Horror Studies Archive moderated our Extreme and Erotic Horror panel where Brian Keene, Wrath James White (another Guest of Honor), Eric LaRocca, CJ Leede, Hailey Piper, and Wesley Southard talked about the subgenre and why it is important for libraries to carry these books. These are all critical acclaimed authors writing books you MUST carry. They are no "too much" for your collections; they are essential Horror titles for Libraries.

The room switch made us a little discombobulated for Tweeting. But you can find things in my feed (access explained above)

And the last panel was our Summer Scares panel, moderated by me. Featuring Daniel Kraus, Lora Senf, Clay McLeod Chapman, Yaika Sabat from NoveList, and Stephanie from Books in the Freezer podcast. Shout out to newest member of our HWA Library Advisory Council, Jocelyn (you can find out more about her in the "How to Feature Horror at Your Library panel linked above) for capturing this picture of us.

Please go to the Summer Scares Resource page for all the information about that program.

The next day I had a lot of meetings since I am on the HWA Board, but I did get to moderate the HWA Membership Meeting and do a panel for authors on the dos and don'ts of promoting yourself. 

And then it was time to get ready for the Bram Stoker Awards banquet and presentation. 

I was in the room early, so here is my "Before" tweet:

And here is the photo of all of the winners, "After."

Rather than recap everything that happened, I will direct you to a few other places. First, here is my post listing all of the nominees, back in February, as part of my regular series of covering literary awards as a RA Tool.

The award recipients as covered by File 770 are listed here.

You can watch the entire ceremony here; including me and Konrad Stump giving out the first ever award for Middle Grade to our current Summer Scares Spokesperson, Daniel Kraus.

I will be writing a recap article for The Lineup later this week much like the one I wrote last year, here.

And in a few days, the official Bram Stoker Awards page will be updated for posterity.

But I would be remiss not to mention Stokers my friends Cynthia Pelayo, Daniel Kraus, and Gabino Iglesias. Cina and Gabino also became the first and second Puerto Ricans to receive Stoker Awards as well.

I want to point out Gabino's win for The Devil Takes You Home in particular. This book has been up for numerous non-Horror awards already this year, including the Edgar Award, but when I first read this over a year ago, I knew it was the best Horror novel of the year. Click here for my thoughts about WHY this book is so good which includes a link to my official review an an interview I did with Iglesias, both for Library Journal. 

Readers of this blog may remember when ARRT invited Gabino to an event to speak to all of us back in November of 2019. I wrote about that here and it has a link to my twitter recap of the event including Gabino's remarks. He is now and always has been a huge supporter of libraries. I was one of the first people he thanked by name when winning the Stoker and it is not because we are friends alone, it is because libraries are important to authors, especially those like Gabino who are from marginalized identities and who made their way up from the small presses. Libraries are essential to getting out the work of authors who do not get promoted in traditional places, especially when those authors have amazing, blinding talent, like Gabino. Without us, there are no people like Gabino winning major literary awards.

Again, you can watch the ceremony here (he is at the very end), but he said this during his speech about us (quote courtesy of Jocelyn again.)

"I want to thank the librarians. We wouldn't be here without them...when you mess with librarians, you mess with all of us." ~ Gabino Iglesias

A lot happened over the long weekend I was at StokerCon. This is just a glimpse of it, but I want to leave it there. I hope ALA Annual (beginning Friday afternoon) can be as great. We will see.