The Speculative Literature Foundation has awarded its 2019 Working Class Writers Grant to Carrie Callahan.

The $1,000 Working Class Grant is intended to assist working class, blue-collar, poor, and homeless writers who have been historically underrepresented in speculative fiction due to the financial barriers that have made it much harder for them to access the writing world. SLF created the annual grant in 2013.

Callahan received the grant for her short story “The Zombie in the Yard.” She is also the recipient of a 2019 Writers of the Future Award for her short story “Dirt Road Magic,” which appears in Writers of the Future Volume 35.

Callahan has described her writing as Dirt Spec, or speculative fiction about people who are economically disadvantaged, inspired by her own background. She says that she “strives to portray these people with nuance even amid space wars, zombie invasions, and magical school graduations.”

[Based on a press release. Via Locus Online. Note: Two different award years are given in the press release. The SLF grant winners list indicates this is the 2019 grant.]