The Speculative Fiction Foundation has awarded the 2016 Diverse Writers Grant to Gabriel Thibodeau and the 2016 Diverse Worlds Grant to Eden Royce.

The Speculative Literature Foundation’s Diverse Writers and Diverse Worlds Grants, support any purpose that writer recipients may choose to benefit their work. The $500 Diverse Writers grant is “intended to support new and emerging writers from underrepresented and underprivileged groups, such as writers of color, women, queer writers, disabled writers, working-class writers, etc. — those whose marginalized identities may present additional obstacles in the writing / publishing process.” The $500 Diverse Worlds grant is “intended for work that best presents a diverse world, regardless of the writer’s background.”

Eden Royce

Eden Royce’s work has appeared in a number of anthologies of horror and dark fiction, and her articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Graveyard Shift Sisters. In 2015, she published a collection of southern gothic horror entitled Spook Lights. She notes that the collection includes “descriptions of the lives of African-Americans, many times underrepresented in horror fiction or relegated to secondary and tertiary characters.” She hopes that the Diverse Worlds grant will help to “increase the visibility of my work and in doing so, widen the definition of horror to include more marginalized voices.” Her website is http://edenroyce.com/.

Gabriel Thibodeau

Thibodeau is an author of magical realism, and he says that, “My voice as a writer is directly influenced by my culture, history, and background. It makes perfect sense that I feel most inspired writing within a genre born of Latin blood.” He adds that he’s thrilled to receive an award that “shirks the boundaries that, in this magic, gay Mexican’s opinion, arbitrarily limit much of the literature we see published today [and] sees that otherness as an asset and an opportunity.” His website is http://gabrielthibodeau.com/.

In 2016, there were 87 applications for the grants, which are awarded by a volunteer jury based on merit. This year’s jurors were Leah Bobet, Tonya Liburd, James Nicoll, and Malon Edwards. The jury also chooses Honourable Mentions for both grants; this year, the Honorable Mentions for the Diverse Writers grant were Errick Nunnally, Pascha Stevenson, and Zainab Amadhy, while the Honourable Mentions for the Diverse Worlds grant were Errick Nunnally, Mimi Mondal, and Zainab Amadhy.

Last year, the winner of both grants was author Carmen Maria Machado.

[From the press release.]