John Farris, the brainchild behind the horror website Dead, Buried and Back, interviewed me a few months back at the World Horror Convention in Austin. John filmed the entire interview, which totals almost an hour of great discussion, and recently posted it over at his site.

If you’ve got some time, please stop by and take a look. We cover a lot of ground in this interview, from disaster mitigation to the future of the horror genre, and I’m very proud of how it turned out.

Hope you like it!

I’m reprinting this from the HWA website because it’s got some great content about the speciality award winners. Congratulations to all the winners. It was a wonderful weekend!

HORROR WRITERS ASSOCIATION
244 5th Avenue, Suite 2767, New York, NY 10001 http://www.horror.org
For immediate release
March 31, 2011

HWA 2010 SPECIALTY PRESS AWARD GOES TO DARK REGIONS PRESS
Dark Regions Press, of Colusa, California, will receive the Horror Writers Association’s Specialty Press Award for 2010. The award will be presented during the gala Bram Stoker Awards Banquet to be held this year in Long Island as part of the Stoker Awards Weekend, June 16 – 19.

The annual Specialty Press 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.

Joe Morey’s Dark Regions Press emphasizes horror, publishing novels, novellas, single-author collections, and poetry. They publish both finely-bound limited editions and trade editions, and their authors have included Michael A. Arnzen, Bruce Boston, Angeline Hawkes, Charlee Jacob, Scott Nicholson, Stephen Mark Rainey, Tony Richards, Gord Rollo, Steven Savile, Harry Shannon, David B. Silva, Marge Simon, Jeff Strand, and David Niall Wilson, among many others.

Dark Regions was started by Morey in 1985, and their books have since won numerous awards. They’ve also published several periodicals, including Dark Regions magazine.

Past winners of the Specialty Press Award include Tartarus Press, Delirium Books, Earthling Publications, PS Publishing, and Bloodletting Press. Cemetery Dance won the first Specialty Press Award in 1997.

For more information about Dark Regions Press, visit the company website at http://www.darkregions.com.

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ANGEL LEIGH McCOY AWARDED 2010 SILVER HAMMER AWARD
The Board of Trustees of the Horror Writers Association is pleased to announce that the 2010 Silver Hammer Award is being awarded to Angel Leigh McCoy. The Hammer 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 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.

Angel McCoy currently oversees HWA’s Dark Whispers blog, which promotes members’ books to hundreds of librarians, booksellers, and readers; under Angel’s management, the blog has been redesigned to include a Twitter feed, making it even more popular and timely. Angel also built and oversees HWA’s Wiki, on which members can promote their accomplishments and their books, and she works behind the scenes with HWA’s web team to ensure that the organization’s massive website is as up-to-date and streamlined as possible.

Past winners of the Silver Hammer Award include Lawrence Watt-Evans, Sèphera Girón, Kathy Ptacek, Robert Weinberg and Douglas Winter.

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MICHAEL COLANGELO AWARDED 2010 RICHARD LAYMON AWARD
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 examplary manner and has shown extraordinary dedication to the organization.

HWA’s current President Rocky Wood has chosen Michael Colangelo to receive the 2010 Richard Laymon Award. Michael serves as HWA’s Membership Chairman, overseeing applications of both new members and of upgrades for current members. “Michael Colangelo soldiers away every week working almost invisibly to keep the turnstiles to the park that is HWA open,” President Wood said in regards to his choice for the 2010 Award. “Dealing with new member applications and verifying membership levels for those new members is far from glamorous but also absolutely vital and Michael completes the task with a suitably diplomatic hand. For that I as President and our entire membership show our respect by bestowing the Richard Laymon Award.” Past winners of the Richard Laymon Award include Kathy Ptacek, Judi Rohrig, Lee Thomas, Lisa Morton, Stephen Dorato, Christopher Fulbright, Mark Worthen, John R. Little, and Vince A. Liaguno.

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Note: The conference and the awards banquet are open to the public.

The Horror Writers Association is a worldwide organization promoting dark literature and its creators. Started in 1985, it has over 500 members who are writing professionally in fiction, nonfiction, videogames, films, comics, and other media.

For more information about the HWA, the Bram Stoker Awards, or the Specialty Press Awards, please visit http://www.horror.org. More information on the Bram Stoker Awards Weekend is available at http://www.stokerweekend2011.org/.