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

As with the Darrell Awards, to be eligible for the Hall of Fame either the author’s work must use the greater Memphis area as a significant setting and/or the author must be a resident of the greater Memphis area when the work appears.

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. Her website is at www.shereereneethomas.com .

In recognition of the outstanding service rendered to Midsouth fandom by Dalvan Coger, who passed away in 2002, the Darrell Award renamed its Hall of Fame award for him starting with 2003 inductees.