Authors Sheree Renée Thomas and Malka Older will host the 2021 Hugo Awards Ceremony the DisCon III committee announced today.

“In June, we made a statement speaking to our commitment to increased inclusivity, listening to marginalized communities, and looking towards the future of Worldcon,” said Colette H. Fozard and Bill Lawhorn, co-chairs of DisCon III. “Now that DisCon III is the seated Worldcon, we are delighted to announce two amazing individuals like Sheree and Malka bringing their spirit and energy to such a prestigious ceremony as the Hugo Awards.”

Sheree Renée Thomas is an award-winning short fiction writer, poet, and editor with fellowships and residencies from the Millay Colony of Arts, Bread Loaf Environmental, VCCA, Cave Canem Foundation, and Smith College. She is the author of Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future (Third Man Books, May 26, 2020), her first fiction collection, and two multigenre/hybrid collections, Sleeping Under the Tree of Life (Aqueduct Press), longlisted for the 2016 Otherwise Award and honored with a Publishers Weekly Starred Review and Shotgun Lullabies (Aqueduct). Her widely anthologized works and essays have appeared in places such as the New York Times and The Big Book of Modern Fantasy. She edited the World Fantasy Award- winning speculative fiction volumes, Dark Matter, that first introduced W.E.B. Du Bois’s work as science fiction and was the first black author to be honored with the World Fantasy Award since its inception in 1975. She serves as the Associate Editor of Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora (Illinois State University, Normal).  

Malka Older is a writer, aid worker, and sociologist. Her science-fiction political thriller Infomocracy was named one of the best books of 2016 by Kirkus, Book Riot, and the Washington Post. Infomocracy was also shortlisted for the 2019 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award. With the sequels Null States (2017) and State Tectonics (2018), she completed the Centenal Cycle trilogy, a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Series in 2018. She is also the creator of the serial Ninth Step Station, currently running on Serial Box, and her short story collection …And Other Disasters was published in November 2019. Named Senior Fellow for Technology and Risk at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs for 2015, she has more than a decade of field experience in humanitarian aid and development.

“As we move forward,” Fozard and Lawhorn concluded, “we will continue to listen to the Worldcon community’s needs and concerns. We also acknowledge broad, general statements can ring hollow. With CoNZealand now over, we are focusing our efforts on specific, concrete plans and initiatives for making our Worldcon inclusive and diverse.”

DisCon III is the third World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) held in Washington DC, USA. Previous DC-based Worldcons were DisCon I in 1963 and DisCon II in 1974. DisCon III will be held at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park and Omni Shoreham from August 25-29, 2021.

DisCon III is sponsored by the Baltimore-Washington Area Worldcon Association, Inc. (BWAWA, Inc.), a 501(c)3 non-profit organization based in Maryland. For more information on DisCon III, Worldcon, and how to become a member of the 79th Worldcon, visit http://www.discon3.org.

[Based on a press release.]