SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY AWARD
Entries accepted Nov. 15, 2021 – April 26, 2022

Meet this year's judges


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Colette Bancroft

Colette Bancroft

Colette Bancroft grew up in Tampa, earned degrees in English at the University of South Florida and University of Florida, and taught literature and writing for more than a decade. Since 1997, She has worked for the Tampa Bay Times as an editor, reporter and critic. In 2007, she became the Times’ book editor, writing reviews, interviewing authors and helping to direct the annual Times Festival of Reading. She has served two terms on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. In 2021, her short story “The Bite” received the Mystery Writers of America’s Robert L. Fish Award for the best short story by a previously unpublished American author. She lives in St. Petersburg with her dog, Marlowe, and cat, Isabel.


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Tenea D. Johnson

Tenea D. Johnson

Tenea D. Johnson is a multimedia storyteller, musician, editor, arts & empowerment entrepreneur, and award-winning author of seven speculative fiction works, including 2021’s release, Frequencies, a Fiction Album and Broken Fevers, of which Publisher’s Weekly wrote “the 14 hard-hitting, memorable short stories and prose vignettes in this powerhouse collection … are astounding in their originality” (starred review).


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Rick Wilber

Rick Wilber

Rick Wilber is an award-winning writer, editor and teacher who has published more than fifty short stories, several novels and short-story collections, three edited anthologies, a memoir, and a half-dozen college textbooks on writing and the mass media.

His most recent novel is Alien Day, the second of a trilogy based on his long-running S’hudonni Empire series of stories. The first book in the trilogy, Alien Morning, was a finalist for the 2016 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction novel of 2016.

Other recent publications include The Wandering Warriors (New Word City, 2020) co-authored with Alan Smale; the short-story collection Rambunctious: Nine Tales of Determination (WordFire Press 2020); Making History: Classic Alternate History Stories (Ed.) (New Word City, 2019); and the collection The Moe Berg Episodes (New Word City, 2018).

He is a Visiting Professor in the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at Western Colorado University, and he is he co-founder and co-judge with Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine Editor Sheila Williams of the Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing, awarded annually at the International Conference on the Fantastic in Orlando, Florida.

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