Foundation Members:

The Black Circle Award Special Election

The REH Foundation Board revamped the voting rules and categories for the REH Awards a few years ago. For the Black Circle Award, the Board allows nominations to be made by anyone, whether a member or not of the Foundation, and the Board. However, the Board reserved the right to be the only voting body for the Black Circle Award. This year, we received no nominees from the membership at large. So, the Board talked about whom we could nominate, as is our right to do so under the rules. We realized that of the four names of people eligible for the award that we came up with, three are current Board members. So, in order to be transparent and avoid the appearance of impropriety and nepotism, we have decided to allow the membership at large to again vote on membership in the Black Circle for this election because of this situation.  Under the rules, a nominee must receive a threshold of 60% of the votes cast to win. If there is no person that gets this in the first round, the top two vote getters will go into a run-off election with the person getting the simple majority winning.

Here are the requirements for eligibility for the Black Circle along with the slate of nominees and their accomplishments for consideration of your vote. After reviewing their contributions, please vote for the person you feel deserves to be given this honor.

The Black Circle Award – Lifetime Achievement

Requirements: Individuals who have made significant and long-lasting contributions to REH scholarship, publishing, or the promotion of Howard’s life and works. Eligible candidates must have been publicly involved in Howard-related activities for a minimum of two decades. Sixty percent of the vote is required for induction into the Black Circle.

Nominees:

Mark Finn

Mark Finn is a writer and editor, who has been an outspoken champion of Howard’s works for many years. He is the author of Blood and Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard, widely considered to be the definitive biography of the Texas author and a work that was nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 2007. Mark joined REHUPA in 2002 and shortly began contributing to both The Cimmerian and The Dark Man, as well as writing many of the introductions for the Wildside Press editions of Howard’s works. This work led to his winning the inaugural Venarium Award in 2005. His articles, essays, and introductions about Robert E. Howard and his works have appeared in publications for the REH Foundation, Dark Horse Comics, Boom! Comics, REH: Two-Gun Raconteur, The Howard Review, and he has presented papers on REH at the PCA/ACA National conference and contributed chapters to multiple scholarly essay collections. In 2012, he organized a massive multi-panel tribute to Robert E. Howard at the World Science Fiction Convention. That same year saw the release of the massively-expanded revised edition of Blood and Thunder which further cemented the work as the go-to biography on Howard. In 2013-15 he co-edited the four-volume Fists of Iron, the complete boxing stories of Robert E. Howard along with Chris Gruber and Patrice Louinet. He has published two collections of his Howard essays, and is the winner of two Atlantean Awards.

Chris Gruber

Chris Gruber became formally involved in Robert E. Howard fandom in 2002 when he joined REHUPA. From the beginning Chris was a relentless champion of Howard’s long-neglected boxing stories. He was a frequent contributor to The Cimmerian and The Dark Man journals, as well as The Cimmerian and REH: Two-Gun Raconteur blogs. He has contributed multiple chapters to scholarly essay collections, given presentations at the PCA/ACA conference and academic institutions, and edited Howard’s Boxing Stories (2005) from the University of Nebraska Press, the last resulting in a Black River Award. Along with Mark Finn and Patrice Louinet, he co-edited the monumental four-volume set of Howard’s complete boxing stories, Fists of Iron (2013-15). He served as a consultant and contributor to the Kull sourcebook from Modiphius games. In 2018 he co-edited A Robert E. Howard Sampler with Bobby Derie.

Fred Malmberg

Fredrik Malmberg is CEO of Heroic Signatures, which holds the rights to Robert E. Howard’s work. Fredrik has protected the legacy of Howard’s characters for more than two decades and has helped maintain their prominence in popular culture by overseeing their licensing in film, comics, video games, RPGs, books, merchandising, and other media. His first professional venture into the world of Robert E. Howard was in the early 1980s, publishing the Swedish language editions of the Conan stories. In the early 2000s, Fredrik’s company Paradox purchased the rights to Conan and the other Howard characters and his initial efforts contributed to what has become known as the Second Howard Boom, with the publication of the authoritative REH texts in trade paperback form, the launch of the successful Age of Conan MMO video game, and the highly acclaimed comic series from Dark Horse. In 2006, he helped initiate the creation of the REH Foundation to help protect Robert E Howard’s literary legacy. In the years since, Fredrik has overseen the launch of multiple successful games on various platforms and films of both Conan and Solomon Kane. Under his watch, Heroic Signatures has recently launched a successful new publishing venture with Titan Books producing both comics and prose with Howard’s characters.

Rob Roehm

Rob Roehm is known as one of the most relentless researchers in tracking down the most obscure biographical details of Robert E. Howard’s life. He has also been indefatigable as the primary editor behind the scenes at the REH Foundation Press. Rob joined the REH Inner Circle in 2002 and REHUPA in 2004 and soon became a regular contributor to The Cimmerian and REH: Two-Gun Raconteur journals and blogs, resulting in two Hyrkanian Awards and four Cimmerian Awards for his essays, as well as the 2006 Venarium Award. He edited dozens of publications for the REH Foundation, including the Newsletter from 2008 to 2015, as well as the Collected Letters and the Collected Poetry. He’s authored two books on Robert E. Howard’s Texas, Howard’s Haunts and The Brownwood Connection, both of which received Atlantean Awards. He has also published multiple collections of reference materials related to Robert E. Howard including School Days in the Post Oaks, Lone Scout of Letters: Herbert C. Klatt, and The Collected Letters of Doctor Isaac M. Howard. His biographical discoveries have resulted in three Black River awards over the years and more recently he has started his own blog Howard History to republish some of his earlier work.

Please cast your votes by 11:59 PM, CDT, March 31, 2024. If a runoff election is needed, the top two vote-getters will be announced on April 5, 2024, and the runoff election will close at 11:59 PM, April 12, 2024.