The Locus Awards Weekend will be held virtually again June 21-24, 2023! But wait, there’s more! This year we are adding a LIVE IN-PERSON EVENT for the awards, including a ceremony with the fabulous MC Maggie Tokuda-Hall, special guest Connie Willis, a catered reception with food by Havana Restaurant (plus bar), and more, to be held Saturday, June 24 at Locus HQ at the historic Preservation Park in downtown Oakland CA. The awards event will also be made available online for our virtual participants — you can attend from anywhere. But if you are in the Bay Area, or come in for the event, we’ll have a great evening to celebrate the finest of 2022 and a chance to mingle with some of our fabulous local SFF community.
The 2023 Locus Awards finalists have been announced: 2023 Locus Awards Top Ten Finalists
There will also be a one-day Locus Bay Area Writers Workshop Writing Master Class with Connie Willis on Sunday June 25, 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., on the topic of beginnings and endings, located at Preservation Park near the awards venue. The event is ticketed separately and workshop ticketing is open! For more info: Locus Bay Area Writers Workshop: Writing Master Class with Connie Willis, June 2023
MEMBERSHIPS LEVELS:
Virtual memberships are $35 and include access to all online events and six months of digital Locus Magazine. Virtual events include readings and online hangout space, plus online access to the Locus Awards ceremony and panels.
Virtual+Live Awards memberships are $95 and include everything that is part of the virtual membership, plus entry to the in-person live awards ceremony with MC Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Special Guest Connie Willis, plus a catered reception (party!), swag, and more, taking place on Saturday, June 24 in the historic Nile Hall at Preservation Park in Oakland, California.
Live-only Awards memberships are $60 and include entry to the in-person live awards ceremony with MC Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Special Guest Connie Willis, plus a catered reception (party!), swag, and more, taking place on Saturday, June 24 in the historic Nile Hall at Preservation Park in Oakland, California.
If you’d like to support us as a top-tier donor and be thanked in our event program, you can purchase a special $350 Friend of Locus membership which entitles you to attend all digital and in-person events, plus the Locus Awards 2023 T-shirt, a VIP tour of the Locus offices, a special backer gift, and our eternal thanks. (You don’t have to attend in person to support at this level.)
Also, SF in SF is hosting a reading with Fran Wilde and Henry Lien at the American Bookbinders Museum in San Francisco, Sunday, June 25, 2023. Make a science fiction weekend of it and attend both events!
You can add on the limited-edition 2023 Locus Awards T-shirt to any order for $35 at checkout, or other Locus swag.
Join in the fun! We can’t wait to see you, whether virtually, live, or both.
LOCUS AWARDS SCHEDULE
Wednesday, June 21
4:00 p.m. PDT – Online Reading: Eileen Gunn and Sequoia Nagamatsu
5:00 p.m. PDT – Online Reading: John Chu and Kristina Ten
6:00 p.m. PDT – Online Reading: Tananarive Due and Suzanne Palmer
Thursday, June 22
4:00 p.m. PDT – Online Reading: C.S.E. Cooney and Hannah Yang
5:00 p.m. PDT – Online Reading: Daniel Abraham and Maureen McHugh
6:00 p.m. PDT – Online Reading: Ai Jiang and Samantha Mills
Friday, June 23
4:00 p.m PDT – Online Reading: R.S.A. Garcia and John Wiswell
5:00 p.m PDT – Online Reading: Ian Muneshwar and Connie Willis
6:00 p.m PDT – Online Hangout with Connie Willis and Locus folks
Saturday, June 24
1:00-2:00 p.m. PDT – Panel (in-person & on zoom)
“The Idea Factory: Strategies for Invention”, with Emily Flummox, Sumiko Saulson, Ysabeau S. Wilce, and Audrey T. Williams (m)
2:15-3:15 p.m PDT – Panel (in-person & on zoom)
“Keeping the Thread: Weaving Complex Worlds into Engaging Stories”, with Kemi Ashing-Giwa, Naseem Jamnia, Shweta Taneja (m), and Fran Wilde
3:30-4:30 p.m PDT – Panel (in-person & on zoom)
“You Got Your Comedy in My SF/F! How to Write with Humor”, with Charlie Jane Anders, Gail Carriger (m), Maggie Tokuda-Hall, and Connie Willis
4:30-6:00 p.m. – Pre-Awards Reception Catered by HAVANA RESTAURANT
Featuring CARGO CULT BOOKS with books for sale and informational tables with representatives from the East Bay Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Meetup and the AfroSurreal Writers Workshop!
6:00 p.m. – LOCUS AWARDS CEREMONY with MC Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Special Guest Connie Willis
Due to some technical obstacles, we were unable to capture the beginning of the ceremony. We have put together the finalist slides and the acceptance speeches for the first couple of categories, and then the video begins at Best Editor. Thank you for your patience and understanding. This was our first attempt at live streaming the awards. We will do a better job of it next year, and promise to make new and different mistakes.
If you are a Locus Awards ticket holder, all of the reading and panels are available to watch at the Locus Awards Schedule page.
Additional info: Attendees will be expected to mask while indoors during the events unless eating or drinking for the safety of the community. There will be a catered reception during the events during which time attendees may be unmasked. Speakers on stage may also choose to be unmasked. Please take this into consideration when purchasing your membership. Attendees should have vaccination cards available upon request. We will not require members to test for COVID-19 either before or during the events. However, we do encourage members to test prior to attending if you are able to do so.
There is no dress code for the Locus Awards. Wear whatever makes you happy! From geek chic to dressy casual to full red carpet regalia, we like it all. We’ve even had people show up in full dinosaur gear and we did not say no.
T-shirts are an add-on, and will be shipped to your door (extra shipping fee outside of the US). All the above memberships include a set digital subscription to the magazine, from our February 2023 issue (our Year-in-Review issue with Recommended Reading List and Poll and Survey) to August 2023 (with the Locus Awards photo coverage and writeup) and everything in between. Member subscription is non-transferable and does not affect or extend existing subscriptions.
For those traveling to the Bay Area, hotel rooms are available for Locus Awards attendees at a discounted rate Thursday June 22-Sunday June 25, 2023, from $169 a night, at the brand-new AC Hotel Oakland Downtown, opening this May at 1431 Jefferson Street Oakland, CA 94612. Click here to book: Marriott Event Reservations. For extended stays, contact Joanne Bianchi at 510-994-5000 or email joanne.bianchi2@marriott.com. Please book by June 8, 2023 to obtain these rates.
Thanks as always for all your support and for attending the Locus Awards. Here is a link to our 2022 Locus Awards writeup, where you can see how the awards events went last year!
SLIDING SCALE MEMBERSHIP: We are offering a sliding-scale membership starting at $15 for digital attendees who would otherwise be unable to afford to attend. This is a online-only membership, with access to all online Locus Awards events, but not a subscription or print program.
Locus Supports Inclusivity! Thinking of attending? Please do. We encourage people of color, women, people with disabilities, older people, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people to attend. We welcome people of any gender identity or expression, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, age, size, nationality, religion, culture, education level, and self-identification.
Our Code of Conduct is available here: Locus Science Fiction Foundation Code of Conduct.
Location for Live Events: The Saturday, June 24 programming will take place at Nile Hall in Preservation Park: 668 Thirteenth Street in Oakland CA 94612. It’s a large dark-colored building near the fountain.
Public Transportation. If you plan to take public transit, Preservation Park is a 5-10 minute walk from the 12th Street/Oakland City Center BART station. The nearest bus stops are: 12th Street at MLK and 11th St at Jefferson.
To plan your trip, use Google Maps.
Building Access. The entrance to the park is on 13th Street at MLK Jr. Way. The building is located inside Preservation Park on Thirteenth Street, just a short walk from the main entrance. There is a ramp for the building.
Parking is available inside the park on 13th and Preservation Park Way, and at City Center West Garage, located across the street from the park at 1250 Martin Luther King, Jr. Way, Oakland, CA 94612.
This parking garage entrance is located on Jefferson St. or MLK Jr. Way, directly across the street from the main entrance to Preservation Park. Metered street parking is also available at your own discretion.
Introducing Locus Awards 2023 Sponsors:
The Locus Science Fiction Foundation is pleased to announce that Reid Hoffman is one of the sponsors of the Locus Awards. Co-Founder of LinkedIn, co-Founder of Inflection AI, and partner at Greylock, Reid is an accomplished entrepreneur, executive, and investor. He has played an integral role in building many of today’s leading consumer technology businesses. In 2003 he co-founded LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional networking service. In 2009 he joined Greylock. In 2022, he co-founded Inflection AI. He currently serves on the boards of Aurora, Coda, Convoy, Entrepreneur First, Joby, Microsoft, Nauto, Neeva, and a few early stage companies still in stealth. In addition, he serves on a number of not-for-profit boards, including Kiva, Endeavor, CZ Biohub, New America, Berggruen Institute, Opportunity@Work, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and the MacArthur Foundation’s Lever for Change. He is the host of Masters of Scale, the first American podcast to commit to a 50-50 gender balance for featured guests as well as Possible, a podcast that sketches out the brightest version of the future—and what it will take to get there. He is the co-author of five best-selling books: The Startup of You, The Alliance, Blitzscaling, Masters of Scale, and Impromptu. He is an Aspen Institute Crown Fellow, a Marshall Scholar at Oxford, and a graduate of Stanford University.
Cal Henderson
The Locus Science Fiction Foundation is pleased to announce that Cal Henderson is one of the sponsors of the Locus Awards. Cal Henderson is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Slack. The day-to-day work of Locus Magazine is currently coordinated exclusively through our very busy Slack account, so we are grateful for the venue! Cal oversees Slack’s world-class engineering team and sets the technical vision for the company.
In 2019, he was named a Fortune 40 Under 40 honoree and recognized by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader.
Previously, Cal built and led the engineering teams at Flickr, through its acquisition by Yahoo. An experienced technology leader and a popular speaker on engineering scalability, he authored the best-selling O’Reilly Media book Building Scalable Websites. Cal was also a pioneer in the use of web APIs, and created the basis for OAuth and oEmbed, now used by YouTube, Twitter and many others.
craig newmark philanthropies
The Locus Science Fiction Foundation is pleased to announce that craig newmark philanthropies is one of the sponsors of the Locus Awards. Craig Newmark Philanthropies is an organization started by craigslist founder Craig Newmark, who aims to “support and connect people and drive broad civic engagement, working to advance grassroots organizations that are effective and getting stuff done.” Locus SF Foundation board president Liza Groen Trombi says, “Newmark’s support of the Locus Awards is crucial to our continued work in celebrating quality literature, amplifying new and diverse voices, and increasing interest in speculative fiction throughout the world.”
Interested in sponsoring the awards? Please contact us at locus@locusmag.com for information, subject line: Locus Awards Sponsorship.
