Giron to Receive Silver Hammer Award

The Board of Trustees of the Horror Writers Association is pleased to announce that this year’s Silver Hammer Award is being awarded to Sephera Giron. The Hammer Award is given periodically to an HWA volunteer who has done a truly massive amount of work for our organization, often unsung and behind the scenes. It was instituted in 1996, and is decided by a vote of HWA’s Board of Trustees.

The award is so named because it represents the careful, steady, continuous work of building HWA’s “house” – the many institutional systems that keep the organization functioning on a day-to-day basis. The award itself is a chrome-plated hammer with an engraved plaque on the handle. The chrome hammer is also a satisfying allusion to The Beatles’ song, “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” a miniature horror story in itself.

Sephera Giron has been HWA’s Canadian face for the last decade, working tirelessly to promote the organization at festivals, conventions and monthly meetings. A gifted writer who has published novels with Leisure Books, short fiction with Cemetery Dance and the Hot Blood series, and non-fiction books and articles on witchcraft and astrology, Sephera somehow found time to also work as Mistress of Ceremonies for the 2007 Stoker Awards presentation and she writes a monthly column for the organization’s newsletter.

Past winners of the Silver Hammer Award include Lawrence Watt-Evans, Robert Weinberg and Douglas Winter.