Annie Koyama will receive the 2024 Spurgeon Award

The curator of the the Koyama Provides grant program will be honored at this year’s Cartoon Crossroads Columbus festival in September.

Cartoon Crossroads Columbus, the annual comics festival that was co-founded by comics journalist and advocate Tom Spurgeon, has announced the recipient of this year’s Spurgeon Award.

Annie Koyama, the publisher of the well-regarded (and now defunct) Koyama Press and the curator of the Koyama Provides grant program, will receive the award during this year’s festival in Columbus, Ohio. Koyama Provides awards mini-grants to independent artists, providing them with funding to complete projects or start new ones.

Koyama received the Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award in 2022, and at the time Comic-Con International said she had given out around $300,000 in grants. You can see many of the recipients on Koyama’s Instagram account, where she spotlights their work.

“I’m thrilled to have been chosen as the 2024 recipient of the Tom Spurgeon Award,” Koyama said. “I’m thankful to have found a way to stay connected to a community that I love, by directly supporting artists, especially cartoonists. Tom reached out to me in the early days of the press, when I had seemingly come out of nowhere and he continued to support the press and my plans beyond the press, for which I’ll always be grateful.”

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