This award is given each year honor wondrous achievement in visual conceptualization.
This year’s awardee is Dawn Brown. The award ceremony and discussion will be on Thursday, March 10, 2022 from 6:00-7:15pm.
Dawn Brown spent her childhood fostering an imagination fueled by comic books and monster movies. She quickly made her way from Kansas City to Hollywood and into the art department of big studio pictures. Dividing her time between the studios and her personal projects is a challenge Brown enjoys wholeheartedly. She recently moved behind the camera to start telling stories of her own, wearing many hats as writer, director, and producer. She is the creator of the award-winning animated series, House of Monsters, which ran on El Rey network television. She is the Eisner-nominated creator of the comic book series, Little Red Hot, published by Image Comics. Brown is a member of both the Set Designers and Illustrators crafts in the Art Directors Guild. Her credits include Pirates of the Caribbean, Star Trek, and the upcoming series Obi-Wan Kenobi. She was on the design teams for Alice in Wonderland and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, both films won Academy Awards for Production Design.
This award is given out in honor of Cal State LA alumna Octavia E. Butler to celebrate an author whose writing exemplifies the spirit of her work.
This year’s awardee is John Jennings. The award ceremony and discussion will be on Thursday, March 10 from 4:30-5:45pm.
John Jennings is a professor, author, graphic novelist, curator, and all-around champion of Black culture. He is half of the legendary comics duo known collectively as Black Kirby, and has adapted the work of authors such as Octavia E. Butler and Nnedi Okorafor into graphic novel form.
As Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California at Riverside (UCR), Jennings examines the visual culture of race in various media forms including film, illustrated fiction, and comics and graphic novels. He is the director of Abrams ComicArts imprint Megascope, which publishes graphic novels focused on the experiences of people of color. His research interests include the visual culture of Hip Hop, Afrofuturism and politics, Visual Literacy, Horror, and the EthnoGothic, and Speculative Design and its applications to visual rhetoric.
Jennings is co-editor of the 2016 Eisner Award-winning collection The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art (Rutgers) and co-founder/organizer of The Schomburg Center’s Black Comic Book Festival in Harlem. He is co-founder and organizer of the MLK NorCal’s Black Comix Arts Festival in San Francisco and also SOL-CON: The Brown and Black Comix Expo at the Ohio State University.
The Lemonade Award is for acts of kindness by institutions that further science fiction community, and was created by author Nalo Hopkinson with support from the Speculative Literature Foundation.
This year’s awardee is The 501st Legion. The award ceremony and discussion will be on Friday, March 11th from 3:00-4:30pm online and in University-Student Union, Los Angeles Room.
The 501st Legion is the world's definitive imperial Star Wars costuming organization, with over 14,000 members in over 60 countries. An all-volunteer organization, the members celebrate STAR WARS™ through the creation and use of quality costumes that portray the villainous, morally ambiguous, or non-partisan characters from the universe. The local unit of The 501st Legion is the Southern California Garrison with almost 500 members. The local garrison spans the width of the state from San Luis Obispo County to Riverside County and is organized into 5 regional Squads: Channel Islands, Inland Empire, Los Angeles, Orange, and San Joaquin. The 501st Legion works with and promotes the causes of the American Cancer Society, Starlight Foundation, Make a Wish Foundation, and various children's hospitals worldwide. They are the bad guys doing good.
The Lemonade Award is for acts of kindness by individuals that further science fiction community, and was created by author Nalo Hopkinson with support from the Speculative Literature Foundation.
This year’s awardees are Dr. Jaymee Goh and K Tempest Bradford. The award ceremony and discussion will be on Thursday, March 10 from 10:50am-12:05pm.
Dr. Jaymee Goh
Dr. Jaymee Goh is a Malaysian-Chinese writer, reviewer, editor, and essayist of speculative fiction. Her work has been published in a number of magazines and anthologies, such as Lightspeed Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color, and reprinted in LeVar Burton Reads and Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy. Her reviews and nonfiction have appeared on Tor.com, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Strange Horizons. She co-edited The Sea Is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia (Rosarium 2015), and edited The WisCon Chronices Vol. 11: Trials by Whiteness (Aqueduct 2017). A graduate from the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop in 2016, she received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Riverside, where she dissertated in science fiction studies and critical race theory. She is an editor for Tachyon Publications.
K. Tempest
K. Tempest Bradford is a teacher, media critic, and author of fantasy and science fiction steeped in Black Girl Magic. Her short fiction has appeared in multiple anthologies and magazines, including In The Shadow of the Towers and Strange Horizons. Her media criticism and essays on diversity and representation have been published at NPR, io9, Ebony Magazine, and more.
Tempest began giving talks and teaching classes on representation and creating diverse narratives in 2014 for Writing the Other and has been invited to teach at Clarion West, LitReactor, universities, and gaming companies. Her debut middle grade novel will be out in Fall of 2022 from FSG for Young Readers.