The award’s namesake, Eleanor Taylor Bland, published her first mystery in 1992, Dead Time, which introduced African-American policewoman Marti MacAllister, recently transferred from Chicago to small-town Illinois. Sisters in Crime first set up the Bland Award in 2014 both to honor the legacy of one of crime fiction’s most prolific and respected authors and to provide much needed space in the genre to highlight new and rising voices. Past winners have included Jessica Ellis Laine (2017), Stephane Dunn (2016), Vera Chan (2015), and Maria Kelson (2014). She explains the lure of the geek world as setting: “ When you take a fandom, a self-made community centered around a common pop-culture interest, and throw a couple of dead bodies in there, you’ve got a recipe for fun.” Speaking of the future of the genre, Manansala also represents a new world in which geek culture is increasingly intertwined with traditional approaches to genre. “Because of efforts like this (and the support of other allies in our field),” Manansala said, “our genre will finally evolve. In particular, Manansala cited the group’s 2016 Diversity Report, as well as the Eleanor Taylor Bland Award itself. Yet I’ve also seen some of these very same people decry the thought of diversifying the genre, brushing it off as that dreaded term, ‘political correctness.’ As a new, young(ish) writer who ticks off quite a few boxes on the Diversity Checklist, sometimes you ask yourself why you bother writing in a genre that (sometimes) doesn’t seem to want you there, that deems your very existence as ‘political.’” She noted, however, that organizations like Sisters in Crime, are making an effort to change the field. Manansala acknowledged feeling a certain ambiguity about the mystery world: “I have met some of the kindest, most welcoming people in the crime fiction community. The author described her stories as “ amateur sleuth and cozy mysteries, which are heavily invested in the idea of community: the disruption of its peaceful facade and how only someone from within can set it right.” We reached out to Manansala to ask her a bit about her writing. This prize judges-Cynthia Kuhn, Tonya Spratt-Williams, and Maria Kelson-said of the 2018 honoree, Manansala, she “exhibits sophisticated genre awareness and playfulness with genre conventions and we believe the manuscript-which features a very funny, millennial, Filipina-American protagonist-makes a new, worthy, and worthwhile contribution to crime fiction.”

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