Sean Wallace (born January 1, 1976) is an American science fiction, fantasy, and horror anthologist, editor, and publisher best known for founding the publishing house Prime Books and for co-editing three magazines, Clarkesworld Magazine, The Dark Magazine, and Fantasy Magazine. He has been nominated a number of times by both the Hugo Awards and the World Fantasy Awards, won three Hugo Awards and two World Fantasy Awards, and has served as a World Fantasy Award judge.
Wallace began publishing fiction in 1997, when he launched Cosmos Books, with Philip J. Harbottle, and released Fantasy Annual, a paperback magazine of British authors including E.C. Tubb, John Russell Fearn, and Sydney Bounds. In 1999, the Cosmos Books name was licensed to Wildside Press and output greatly increased, expanding with American and Australian authors. He also became a freelance editor for Wildside Press, working from Ohio.
In mid-2001, Wallace stepped in to assist an ailing company, Imaginary Worlds, though it soon went into bankruptcy. Wallace then launched Prime Books to publish a few of the orphaned books,[1] including the award-winning City of Saints and Madmen, by Jeff VanderMeer. Later, in 2003, he licensed the company to Wildside Press, and moved from Ohio to Pennsylvania, as a full-time senior editor. In early 2009, Wallace reacquired Prime Books, and relaunched it as an independent publishing house in May that year.[2] Wallace was twice-nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 2003 and 2004 for editing Prime Books, in the Special Award: Non-Professional and Special Award: Professional categories.[3][4]
Around this time, he felt that there was a lack of short fiction available in the literary fantasy genre and to cater to this, he launched Fantasy Magazine in 2005, at the World Fantasy Convention in Wisconsin.[5] During 2006 his first nationally distributed book, Horror: The Best of the Year was released, and he took on a co-editing job with Nick Mamatas, with Clarkesworld Magazine.[6] That same year, he won the World Fantasy Award in the Special Award: Professional[7] category for editing Prime Books. In 2009, his work for Clarkesworld gained recognition with Hugo Award[8] and World Fantasy Award nominations.[9] In 2010 and 2011, those efforts were rewarded with back-to-back Hugo Awards. Wallace and the rest of the Clarkesworld team also received World Fantasy Award nominations in 2010, 2012, and 2014. In 2011 he served as a World Fantasy Awards judge and in the same year he launched the World SF Travel Fund with Lavie Tidhar. In 2013 Clarkesworld Magazine and its staff won the Hugo Award a third time,[10] and in 2014 the magazine won its first World Fantasy Award.
Other genre/nongenre efforts Wallace has been involved with include the relaunch and management of WSFA Press; co-founding the Shirley Jackson Awards; managing the SFWA Book Depot at the Nebula Awards conference; and co-administrating the ELFF (Elementary Librarian Family and Friends) facebook group.
Prime Books, founded by Wallace in 2001, is an American independent publishing house. It publishes in a mix of literary and commercial anthologies, collections, novels, and previously published two magazines: Fantasy Magazine and Lightspeed Magazine (both sold November 2011).
Il Buio (Italian edition of The Dark), with Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Lorenzo Crescentini (September 2018 – 2019); 7 issues, along with an omnibus, Il Buio, Anno 1 (2019)
Clarkesworld Magazine, with Nick Mamatas (October 2006-July 2008); with Neil Clarke (August 2008-current); 200 issues
The Dark Magazine, with Jack Fisher (October 2013-April 2016), 11 issues; solely (May 2016-December 2016), 8 issues; with Silvia Moreno-Garcia (January 2017-December 2020), 48 issues; solely (January 2021-June 2022), 18 issues; with Clara Madrigano, (July 2022-current), 12 issues: total: 96 issues
