The American Society for Indexing is pleased to announce the winners of the 2024 Indexing Awards. In the Trade category, Jan Wright won for Shift Happens: A Book about Keyboards, published by Aresluna, LLC. In the Scholarly/Technical category, Enid Zafran won for Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction, published by University of Virginia Press.
Trade—Shift Happens
Marcin Wichary, author of Shift Happens, said "The indexer—Jan Wright—did a fantastic job, slicing through the book and seeing it in ways I never did, and keeping the index lightweight when it could be, but serious in other places that deserved it. I didn’t know an index could have a personality. This one does, and it matches the book really well.”
"It's not just a great access tool, it's actually fun to read through on its own, and I feel like it does a great job reflecting the needs and probably the mindset of its author and its readers," one judge said of the index in Shift Happens.
Jan Wright voiced her enthusiasm for the book. "It was the most wonderful project to work on, and I loved working with the author and the editor. The author was so detail-oriented and really wanted the index to be typeset just right. That’s so rare..."
Scholarly/Technical—Looking for Other Worlds
Enid Zafran said Looking for Other Worlds is literary criticism, “which is a difficult category to index.” She added, the book dealt with works by multiple authors and comprised “complicated ideas like multiple types of feminism and ethics, as well as plot issues.” She said she is pleased with “the way the index displays how to meet such challenges and still remains accessible to users searching for an idea or specific title.”
Judges commented that the book's many diacritics and non-English names were handled well.
The University of Virginia Press was not available for comment, due to the holidays. Look for more details in a future issue of Key Words.
The two winners will each receive $500. More information on the awards and judging process is available here.
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