Paul Di Filippo and Sheila Finch have accepted appointment to the jury for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for the best SF novel of the year. In 2009, Paul A. Carter retired from the jury after having bravely served for many years, almost since the Award’s inception.

Sheila Finch is the author of seven science fiction novels and numerous short stories that have appeared in Amazing, Asimov’s, Fantasy Book, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and many anthologies. A collection of the “Lingster” stories recently appeared as The Guild of Xenolinguists. Sheila taught creative writing at El Camino College for thirty years and at workshops around California. She also writes non-fiction about teaching creative writing and science fiction, most recently, a series of short essays on the field that appear online at the SFWA website. Her work has won several awards, including the Nebula Award for Best Novella, the San Diego Book Award for Juvenile Fiction, and the Compton-Crook Award for Best First Novel.

Paul Di Filippo sold his first story in 1977, and his second in 1985. Since then, he has accumulated over 150 periodical credits, and had twenty-five books published. He has two more due out in 2010. He reviews for a number of venues, including The Barnes & Noble Review. He has lived with his partner Deborah Newton for 34 years in Providence, Rhode Island, currently with a calico cat named Penny Century and a chocolate cocker spaniel named Brownie.

The Campbell Award is one of the major annual awards for science fiction and is presented by the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction. The first Campbell Award was presented at the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1973. Since then the Award has been presented in various parts of the world: at California State University at Fullerton; at St. John’s College, Oxford; at the World SF Writers Conference in Dublin; in Stockholm; at the World SF meeting in Dublin again; the University of Kansas; and in a joint event with the Science Fiction Research Association in Kansas City in 2007. The current jury consists of Gregory Benford, Paul Di Filippo, Sheila Finch, James Gunn, Elizabeth Anne Hull, Paul Kincaid, Christopher McKitterick, Pamela Sargent, and T.A. Shippey.