Why Didn't You Just Leave won the Shirley Jackson Award!

On Wednesday of last week, I met my co-editor, Nadia Bulkin by the Boston Harbor for lunch. She was in town for one day only to read a piece that appeared in the literary journal Ploughshares. We had a traditional New England seafood lunch and got to be excited together in person that the book we'd spent so much time and care editing was a finalist for the 2024 Shirley Jackson Awards in the edited anthology category. Unfortunately, Nadia wouldn't be able to attend the ceremony on Saturday evening because other responsibilities meant she was needed back home, but we figured that was okay, since there was no way our book was going to win with the anthology category so packed with truly excellent books.

We were sure that being nominated for this award was going to be the extent of our honor (and it is a HUGE honor, which we were both very excited about!), but we also knew that we should agree on who we would thank in the impossible dream scenario where we actually won. So we made a short list.

Julia and Nadia's list of people to thank:

• The other best anthology award finalist editors for making great books.
• Our own authors for writing these particular amazing stories.
• Our publisher, Cursed Morsels, for publishing this book.

And then we finished our lunch, and I went back to work and Nadia went to do her reading, and we both cursed the extremely hot and humid Boston weather.

On Thursday, Readercon officially started. Moss and I went over to the con hotel in the early evening and immediately went swimming in the pool because the weather was still far too hot to be comfortable. There, we met dave ring, another of the anthology category finalists for The Crawling Moon: Queer Tales of Inescapable Dread.

As we treaded water in the pool, we had a discussion about the history of feminism and science fiction, and the works and lives of James Tiptree Jr. and Joanna Russ. We also agreed that we had no idea who was going to win the anthology category because all of the nominated books were so good. It is no wonder all the finalists are so good, considering the way that this niche of genre contains so many overlapping connections.

Some of the award overlaps of authors and editors in the Anthology category:

• Both The Crawling Moon and Why Didn't you Just Leave contained stories by Suzan Palumbo.
• Both Why Didn't You Just Leave and Monsters in the Mills contained stories by Victoria Dalpe and Christa Carmen.
• Christa Carmen, edited Monsters in the Mills, and Why Didn't You Just Leave author, Max Booth III, published another of the anthology finalists, Bury Your Gays: An Anthology of Tragic Queer Horror, edited by Sofia Ajram.
• Both Why Didn't You Just Leave and Bury Your Gays contained stories by Cassandra Khaw and Joe Koch.
• My co-editor, Nadia Bulkin, and the editor of Bury Your Gays, Sofia Ajram, were also both finalists in the novella category, along with one of the Why Didn't You Just Leave authors, Eden Royce.

Saturday came around, and Moss and I met up with Christa Carmen (who is one of the Why Didn't You Just Leave authors and also an editor of another finalist anthology, Monsters in the Mills) and Mary Robles (one of the Monsters in the Mills authors) and Jessica P. Wick (another Monsters in the Mills author, whose story from that anthology, "Strike" was also a finalist in the short fiction category) for dinner. We had a lovely time, and we all attended the awards ceremony together.

I have never been more relaxed at an an awards ceremony than I was that night — to begin with, at least. I was so sure our book was not going to win that I wasn't nervous at all. I was just super happy to be in the room with all the other finalists who could attend, and to have my very own Shirley Jackson Awards finalist rock.

If you have never read "The Lottery" you may not understand this reference. If you have, you will understand how darkly hilarious this choice of award token is. I felt like I had won already when F. Brett Cox handed this one to me. If you want to understand the reference, here's the link to "The Lottery" which you can read or listen to, courtesy of The New Yorker.

The awards ceremony started, and Arkady Martine's "Three Faces of a Beheading" won the short fiction category. She wasn't able to attend, so John Wiswell accepted the award on her behalf and read a truly impressive and moving acceptance speech that Arkady had written (there was a break for applause in the middle of this speech — that is how impressive it was). It was at this time that I had a tiny shred of misgiving that Nadia and I had not done more than agree on who we would thank. But it would be fine, I was sure.

And then somehow the anthology category was up and our book was announced as the winner! Twin sparks of elation and terror rose in me as I stood and made my way up to the stage in disbelief. I was very glad that our group had chosen to sit in the back of the room, and that the walk to the front took a bit of time, because, with every step, I was trying to pull together some appropriate and coherent remarks to deliver on the heels of Arkady Martine's absolute banger of a speech.

In the end, I thanked the people we had said we would thank, and I added a bit more, speaking from the heart about the reasons we'd wanted to make a book about haunted places and the reasons why people can't or won't leave them at the first (or seventieth) sign of trouble, about Shirley Jackson's own haunted house stories (which Nadia and I both love), about the way living in the US right now feels a lot like living in a haunted house, and how, like the protagonists in our anthology's stories, everyone living here has compelling reasons why we don't just leave. I can't reproduce the speech here because I didn't write it in advance and I am not a hundred percent sure what all I said. I just know I did mean it sincerely.

I believe in a couple of weeks, the Shirley Jackson Award YouTube Channel will have a video of the ceremony and all the acceptance speeches for anyone who would like to watch.

A few minutes later, I was also delighted to learn that one of the Why Didn't You Just Leave authors, Eden Royce, won in the novella category for her book, Hollow Tongue.

Eden couldn't attend the ceremony in person, but she sent a recording of her acceptance speech, which was lovely. Honestly, all the speeches were, and they made me want to read all the winning works that I hadn't yet read. I immediately put the winning novel, Curdle Creek by Yvonne Battle-Felton, at the top of my reading list.

At the end of the ceremony, they had all of the finalists and winners line up for pictures, but I was in a daze and I didn't end up getting any of my own. I did, however, get to talk briefly with Greer Gilman, Andrea Hairston, and Elizabeth Hand, three incredible writers who are all former Readercon Guests of Honor, and who stepped up at the last minute to help present the awards when the scheduled host was unexpectedly called home. This felt a little like being surrounded by three muses. I would one hundred percent watch a show where these women were cast as a supernatural trio.

The rest of the evening is a bit of a blur. I know I said goodbye to my dinner companions (who needed to drive back to Rhode Island that evening), and hello to many other people. I also missed several people I had hoped to see (like Carina Bissett, a finalist in the single author collection category for Dead Girl, Driving and Other Devastations, and one of the editors of Shadow Atlas: Dark Landscapes of the Americas, which contains a story I wrote and a poem I translated).

Moss and I decided to make a circuit of the social areas and talk to friends.

I took only one photo all night, which was of Scott Edelman cutting up donuts to share with everyone as Greer Gilman looked on. This is extremely on brand behavior for Scott, who has a podcast called Eating the Fantastic, in which he invites authors to eat a meal and talk with him. I think the Readercon hotel was probably grateful that this year his sharing food was donuts and not a durian (because, yes, he has brought a durian to Readercon in the past).

We left the donut feast and caught up with Victor Manibo, Manish Melwani (finalist in the short fiction category for "MAMMOTH"), Ian Muneshwar, and dave ring in the hotel bar, where dave took a picture of us with the award.

dave also showed me the award's secrets. He won in a previous year for Unfettered Hexes: Queer Tales of Insatiable Darkness, so he knew that award is a functional compass, that the sundial part of the award stands up, and that my name would be engraved on the underside.

We continued our rounds and saw still more friends (yet, somehow, inevitably, missed many others!), and then I pled exhaustion and we returned home to our cats and a little bit of celebratory ice cream before bed.

Here is the complete list of winners for the 2024 Shirley Jackson Award:

NOVEL
Curdle Creek: A Novel by Yvonne Battle-Felton (Henry Holt & Co)

NOVELLA
Hollow Tongue by Eden Royce (Raw Dog Screaming Press)

 NOVELETTE
The Thirteen Ways We Turned Darryl Datson into a Monster by Kurt Fawver (Dim Shores)

SHORT FICTION
“Three Faces of a Beheading” by Arkady Martine (Uncanny Magazine Issue Fifty-Eight)

 SINGLE-AUTHOR COLLECTION
Midwestern Gothic by Scott Thomas (Inkshares)

EDITED ANTHOLOGY
Why Didn’t You Just Leave, edited by Julia Rios and Nadia Bulkin (Cursed Morsels Press)

Thank you again to everyone who helped create Why Didn't You Just Leave, including the incredible authors and illustrators (listed individually below), Nadia Bulkin (a wonderful co-editor), Eric Raglin (our publisher at Cursed Morsels), our formatter, Sam Cowan (founder of Dim Shores), and all the Kickstarter backers who gave us the funding we needed to produce the book and pay our contributors.

Why Didn't You Just Leave contributors, who created the stories and art that moved the jury for this award:

• Corey Farrenkopf
• Alberto Chimal
• E. M. Linden
• Yves Tourigny
• Die Booth
• Raquel Castro
• Steve Loiaconi
• J. A. W. McCarthy
• Yornelys Zambrano
• Eden Royce
• R. Diego Martinez
• Gabe Converse
• Victoria Dalpe
• Shauntae Ball
• Tonia Ransom
• Christa Carmen
• Luke Spooner
• Suzan Palumbo
• Lyndsey Croal
• Cassandra Khaw
• Alexis Dubon
• Rhiannon Rasmussen
• Joe Koch
• I. S. Belle
• Max Booth III

Thank you also to the Shirley Jackson Awards administrators, and the jury who took so much time and care in reading works from 2024 and selecting the finalists and winners. Having served on awards juries before, I know how much work goes into that process!

I am honored, surprised, and delighted that our ghost story book won this award! Editing it, and translating the two stories by Alberto Chimal and Raquel Castro, was a truly wonderful experience for me, and I hope that this award recognition means that more people will discover the stories and be both moved and creeped out by them as much as Nadia and I were.