We need your recommendations of works for the Otherwise Award jurors to consider. If you’ve read a work of science fiction or fantasy that explores or expands our understanding of gender, please tell us about it by filling out the recommendation form below. If you have more than one, fill out the form again for each recommendation.
(Works can be books, stories, music, video, fanfic, social media posts, or any other form of speculative fiction.)
Anything that you enter in the Author, Title, Publisher, Link, and Additional Comments fields will be publicly visible. If you want to add non-public comments about the work that you’re recommending, email recommendations@otherwiseaward.org.
The Additional Comments field is optional, but we recommend saying something in that field about the ways in which the work explores or expands gender.
Because anyone can recommend a work, a work’s presence on this list doesn’t indicate recognition by the Otherwise Award, so please don’t use a work’s presence on this list to promote the work. You’re welcome to promote works that win the award, or that appear on an Honor List.
Recommendations for this year’s award close in late 2025. (Recommendations after that will go to the 2026 award.) The 2025 awards will be given in 2026, location to be determined.
To let us know something related to recommendations that doesn’t fit in the form, email recommendations@otherwiseaward.org.
You can recommend works published in 2024, but only if they weren’t on the 2024 recommendations list.
The 2025 Otherwise Award Recommendations
| Author | Title | Publisher | Comments | Sub Date | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| April McCloud | The Switch | QueerSpace/Rebel Satori | This book absolutely blew my mind. The author does an incredible job of expanding their main character's perspectives on gender, identity, and disability. Naomi (the MC) is forced into a situation where the only way out is an illegal body-swap. She experiences living in bodies that don't match her gender identity and meets people with a variety of relationships to gender and self. It's action-packed, creative, and incredibly readable, but just as impressive, it makes its points about gender, disability, and identity in slow, gentle ways that are accessible to even people with little life-experience outside of abled- and cishet-normativity. I wish everyone in the world could get a copy of this book. I think it would start some important conversations.rebelsatori.com/product/the-switch/ | 2024-11-24 09:16:48 | |
| Miranda Mellis | Crocosmia | Nightboat Books | From the author/publisher: A philosophical fable, Crocosmia centers on Maya as she recollects the “great turning”—an epochal shift towards egalitarian eco-socialism. She recalls growing up on a rural commune run by anarchist nuns and how her mother, Jane, created a telekinetic artwork with the uncanny power to intervene in geopolitics. Maya and Jane’s relationship enacts the tension between a life of wounded, lyrical solitude and militant, anti-statist action. This lush novel is a meditation on how, on the precipice of biospheric unraveling, dreams of communal care can bloom.nightboat.org/book/crocosmia/ | 2024-11-20 20:52:40 | |
| Lana Min | Alaric | Medium | medium.com/the-black-veil/there-once-was… | 2024-11-17 14:08:15 | |
| Sarah Salcedo | In a Clearing on the Darkest Day | Kaleidotrope | kaleidotrope.net/autumn-2024/in-a-cleari… | 2024-11-16 13:59:49 | |
| Linda H. Codega | Motheater | Erehwon | 2024-07-29 11:41:08 |