Hi, everyone! The Otherwise Award has been on a pause lately; during that pause, we on the motherboard have been discussing ways to update the award, improving various things about the way that it works while staying connected to the roots and tradition of the award.

Short version of this message: We’re now returning from the pause with a new streamlined process, and we’re moving forward with the award for work published in 2024. Send us your recommendations!

(The 2022 and 2023 awards are still on hold.)

For more details, read on.

Our main goal

We will continue in the tradition of the award, honoring and promoting recent works that explore and expand our ideas of gender.

But we’re improving how we do that, by bringing the award even more into line with our values. For example, we’re making the process more sustainable and more equitable, and going even further in our traditional approach of honoring multiple works.

What isn’t changing

• We’ll still rely on recommendations from the public.
• We’ll still celebrate multiple works, not just one or two each year.
• We’ll still have our Fellowship program.

What is changing

• We’re changing our focus somewhat. In particular, we plan to:
  • Focus less on honoring one specific work, and more on curating a short list of works.
  • Focus less on presenting an award, and more on having a conversation around recent works.
  • Focus less on having a celebration at one or two conventions, and more on creating accessible ways for the public to engage with the jury’s thoughts.
• We’re reducing the amount of unpaid labor and burnout involved. We plan to:
  • Reduce the amount of work jury members have to do.
  • Spread out required work among more people.
  • Pay more people for doing infrastructure/support work, such as an administrative coordinator to support the jury.

What you’ll get each year

Under the new approach, each year’s jury will create the following:

• An honor list of about three to six works, with a description of why the jurors chose each one. (That is, the jury won’t be selecting only one winner.)
• Optionally, a “long list” of additional works that the jurors want to call attention to.
• A discussion, among the jurors, of the works on the honor list, any trends or general ideas they noticed, and related topics. This usually takes the form of an online video call, recorded for you to watch.
• A briefer synthesis/distillation of that discussion, such as a text summary, that we publish for the world to read and reference.

The 2024 awards

We’ve started the process for honoring works published in 2024. In particular:

• We have a jury, chaired by Eugene Fischer, who was a winner of the 2015 award.
• We have a paid coordinator, who’s working with Eugene to create the first-stage list.
• We’ve received some recommendations for works published in 2024.

Speaking of which, please recommend more works published in 2024! The form will be open until mid-November, but the sooner you submit recommendations, the better.

We expect to announce the 2024 honor list in late March 2025, and to share a discussion video and a text summary in April or May 2025.

One more thing

A note in passing that we’ve changed our mailing-list platform, as another way of streamlining our process and work—for example, you can now subscribe and unsubscribe yourself, instead of waiting for us to do that for you.

We sent out this blog post as an email. If you didn’t receive that, then you’re probably not on our mailing list. If you want to be on our mailing list, enter your email address in our subscription form.

That’s all for now

Thanks as always for your support. We hope you’ll be as happy as we are with the changes we’re making, and we hope you’ll continue to engage with the award by reading and recommending works, watching the jury presentation next year, and spreading the word about what we’re doing.