We need your recommendations of works for the Otherwise Award jurors to consider. If you’ve read a recently published 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, poems, music, video, fanfic, social media posts, or any other form of speculative fiction.)
Please only recommend works that were published in 2025 or 2026. (For works published in 2025, check to make sure they weren’t on the 2025 recommendations list.)
In the form below, 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 strongly recommend saying something in that field about the ways in which the work explores or expands gender—doing so helps the jury as well as anyone who’s using this page as a reading list.
Because anyone can recommend a work, a work’s presence on this list doesn’t indicate recognition by the Otherwise Awards, so please don’t use a work’s presence on this list to promote the work. (If a work wins an Award or appears on an Honor List, you can use that to promote the work.)
Recommendations for this year’s Awards close in late 2026. (Recommendations after that will go to the 2027 award.) The 2026 awards will be given in 2027, location to be determined.
To let us know something related to recommendations that doesn’t fit in the form, email recommendations@otherwiseaward.org.
The 2026 Otherwise Awards Recommendations
| Author | Title | Publisher | Comments | Sub Date | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cedar Flyte | The Legend of Leanna Page - Volume One: A Beginning | For Elenvia Publications | This legend is set in a mythic world where the two human kingdoms have very different traditions when it comes to gender. In the north they have lords and ladies as we're familiar with in "the real world," but we're introduced to this through the point of view of the southern kingdom which only has "lagifs" - a gender-neutral term that applies to anyone of nobility. The idea of delineating nobles by sex is presented as absurd and unnecessary. Also, the king comes to love a servant who we can understand is masculine non-binary, though they don't have such labels, while our female heroine falls in love with her female best friend. This literary fantasy novel subtly deconstructs our expectations of gender through a story Kirkus Reviews called "An immersive and well-constructed adventure tale...exciting and skillfully delivered."forelenvia.org/the-legend-of-leanna-page | 2026-04-08 08:24:34 | |
| Cade Meridian | The Weight of Petals | Cade Meridian Press | The Weight of Petals approaches gender not as a standalone theme but as one layer of a larger web of identity under pressure. Three of the four child protagonists are girls — Leila, Tessa, and Sam — and the novel refuses to flatten them into a single mode of strength. Leila's resistance is artistic and interior; she mourns the loss of her sketchbook while imprisoned, and draws a jacaranda tree in the dust of a concrete cell because her mother taught her that art is how we fight forgetting. Tessa's strength is tactical and controlled — the daughter of a Native American family who understands from her grandmother's stories that this violence has a long history. Sam's courage is openly emotional: she walks thirteen miles on an infected foot, crying, apologizing for not being stronger, and is told plainly that she can be both broken and brave at once. The novel also depicts the women who survive these children — Sofia, who spends twenty years guiding others through the memorial — without framing endurance as triumph. Gender here is not defined by conventional roles or their subversion, but by how systems of power target, surveil, and unmake people along intersecting lines of ethnicity, documentation status, and age. The adult women in the story — a professor arrested for teaching, a mother pressing a paintbrush pendant into her daughter's hand as agents take her away — are not background figures. Their losses set the terms for everything that follows.a.co/d/099wjndt | 2026-04-01 14:28:17 | |
| S.B. MilneTobi Hill-Meyer; Melissa Sky; Felicity Talisman; Lauren Taylor Bak; Felix Lilly; Debra Anderson; Lyn Hemphill; Claire Deacon; J. Aster; Aeryn Ryder; Elizabeth Rubio; Allison Fradkin; Dani Finn; Heather O'Malley; T.C. Mill | Gender Ever After: A Gender Inclusive Sapphic Romance Anthology | Bold Strokes Books | Gender Ever After is a sapphic romance anthology that revels in the full spectrum of gender expression, identity, and desire. Within these pages, love stories bloom between sapphic people of every kind—cis, trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, and genderfluid—offering a kaleidoscope of possibility, passion, and joy.boldstrokesbooks.com/books/gender-ever-a… | 2026-03-27 03:17:57 | |
| Briana Cox | Indigent | Independent | INDIGENT, written by a nonbinary author, examines the impact of gender roles and expectations on a cast of diverse characters at the intersection of different races, ages, religious beliefs, and familial relationships. The dutiful son. The Mother. The precious daughter. The strict father. The partner. All roles simultaneously liberating and weighing down these characters as they search for a source of stability in their crumbling lives. These roles are further examined through the speculative fiction element of the hivemind the characters live within, a hivemind intent on consumption and self-preservation. Within the hivemind, the secret pressures (open and unspoken, or genuinely buried) of these expectations are laid bare and muddled, unavoidable. What happens when the dutiful son and precious daughter are one in the same? What happens when motherhood or partnership is no longer confined to a body? | 2026-03-25 17:45:24 | |
| Cecilia Tan | The Mystery of the Bitten Peach | Neon Hemlock | The Mystery of the Bitten Peach is a queer/gender identity awakening story told through a lens of Chinese folklore, 20th century Chinese diaspora, and time-travel fantasy. (And an art theft whodunit!) Our narrator, Mei, is the "Dragon's Daughter" a (fictional) folkloric immortal who can travel in time and space to anywhere that is spiritually "China." She grapples with her masculinity and explores the place of same-sex love and attraction in both her personal history and in (real) Chinese history. Shelley Parker Chan described it as "Full of queerness, generative solidarity, and gently profound insights into love and choice."neonhemlock.com/books/bitten-peach | 2026-03-25 14:08:02 | |
| Kirsten Kaschock | An Impossibility of Crows: A Novel | University of Massachusetts Press | Back in the grim farmhouse of her youth, Agnes becomes consumed by a scientific—and deeply personal—experiment: to breed a crow large and intelligent enough to carry her daughter, Mina, to a freedom Agnes has never known herself. As the bird grows, so does its terrifying potential—manifest in language, cunning, and a violent will of its own. What begins as a gesture of love and liberation turns darkly obsessive, echoing the dangerous ambition of Frankenstein’s monster and the generational trauma buried in the soil of her family’s past. A thoroughly modern, feminist novel, this is a story of mothers and daughters, inheritance and isolation, and the thin line between care and control.umasspress.com/9781625349255/an-impossib… | 2026-03-11 08:29:36 | |
| M.L. Krishnan | Ichthyosis | Fantasy Magazine | psychopomp.com/fantasy/issue-99/ichthyos… | 2026-02-28 13:45:52 | |
| Vanessa Kyn | That Time Uncle George Caused the Apocalypse | Fantasy Magazine | psychopomp.com/fantasy/issue97/uncle-geo… | 2026-02-25 12:51:27 | |
| Ysabelle Cheung | Patchwork Dolls | Blair | Directly inspired by contemporary Chinese and Japanese literature, this debut story collection explores agency, disappearance, and the body. Cheung’s 10 speculative fables question what it means to be human and offer an alternate perspective on survival in our increasingly mechanized, oppressive world. blairpub.com/shop/p/patchwork-dolls | 2026-02-23 12:28:34 | |
| Cristy Road Carrera | Sink or Burn | Simon & Schuster | 2026-01-31 17:17:04 | ||
| Cassiopeia Gatmaitan | Hearts and Half-Measures | PseudoPod | The work explores transphobia and reclaiming agency in the context of the Filipino transfeminine. It deals with the realities of sex tourists and transphobic family members through the transformative lens of speculative fiction while also focusing on community among women. The work features a reclamation of the idea that transgender women are monstrous by subverting that trope and revealing that the real terrors in our stories aren't the monsters of myth but the monsters lurking among us, wearing human skin. pseudopod.org/2025/08/22/pseudopod-990-h… | 2026-01-28 22:08:58 | |
| Maz MurrayCharlie Markbreiter | Jaw Filler | Montez Press | Jaw Filler is many things: a neo-noir, a cyberpunk novel, a heist, a rom-com - but it's also a book about people across all kinds of genders, and explores the ways in which trans people's experiences are pathologised and exploited by faceless capitalist forces, as well as how to break out of that cycle. When Detective Sean Hastings is asked to investigate the disappearance of Character, he enters the First Trans Commune in Sim World, a virtual reality community bankrolled by a mysterious tech company, VSI. A pulpy romp through the anxiously assimilated transmasculine id, Jaw Filler asks: who is VSI, and what do they really want? Can you be your own dad? And if Character’s mind is trapped in Sim World, then where is his body?montezpress.com/catalogue/books/jaw-fill… | 2026-01-28 08:03:22 | |
| A.J. Thibault | Hypocrisy | Independently Published | In a satirical science-fiction way, this novel features shapeshifters. That can be any person or gender, and can assume the identity and powers related to that unique individual.amazon.com/hypocrisy-j-thibault-ebook/dp… | 2026-01-17 14:06:05 | |
| Kirk Bueckert | Dark Circuitry | Dark Matter Ink | 'Dark Circuitry' follows a woman on the run forced to assume a dead man's identity and live out her life in VR. The text explores what it means to inhabit a body / gender which is not our own in a world that wants to kill us.darkmattermagazine.shop/products/dark-ci… | 2026-01-17 11:52:36 | |
| Eugen Bacon | The Nga’phandileh Whisperer: A Sauútiverse Novella | Stars and Sabers | This genre-bending, cross-cultural novella interrogates genre in an Afrocentric Sauútiverse, and gender through a prominent female queer protagonist in a science fiction/horror/ Afro-irreal story that also explores themes of belonging. starsandsabers.com/books/the-ngaphandile… | 2026-01-15 23:15:06 | |
| Alexis Westmore | The Creation Code | TDH Publishing | This work explores the developing opportunities for same sex couples to have genetically related children. | 2025-12-16 18:41:23 | |
| Tilly BridgesSusan Bridges | Long Away | seedandspark.com/fund/long-away | 2025-12-16 04:48:42 | ||
| Koji A. Dae | Casual | Tenebrous Press | Casual is a near future science fiction book that explores the intersection of pregnancy and technology. Valya grew up in a world where her body was not her own, and her pregnancy brings to light the ways people lay claim to the minds and bodies of women, forcing her to decide what she wants for her unborn daughter. store.tenebrouspress.com/products/casual… | 2025-12-02 22:25:30 | |
| Rose Michael | Else | Spineless Wonders | 'Else' is a 'climate fiction' novel primarily concerned with a mother–daughter relationship in a not-too-distant future, on a flood and fire ravaged continent. The protagonists' conversation is poetic, punning, alliterative, and atypical: they exchange animal facts 'like a frontier trade'. Leisl has ambivalent feelings about parenting her neurodivergent pre-teen, which 'Else' expands across generations: every character from their 200 years of family history is in some way not biologically related to the family that raises them. The book also explores non-binary ideas, in its before-and-after structure, which swaps points of view, and the figure of 'Yu', a gender-fluid surfer they meet in the afterwards who represents an alternative to the assumptions they are running from. shortaustralianstories.com.au/product/el… | 2025-11-29 20:05:11 | |
| Stacy Nathaniel Jackson | The Ephemera Collector: a Novel | Liveright | In the Diwata Collection, a story within a story presented as an archive, Azwan Adisa is "both/and", a border patroller of the underwater city-state of Diwata in Monterey Canyon. Despite her ambiguous anatomy, she is unashamed, unafraid, and undeterred. The trope of intersex individuals, or for that matter, lack of visibility in literature is dismissed as well as camouflaged; in other words not the point which is an expansion of gender "norms" in and of itself. amazon.com/ephemera-collector-stacy-nath… | 2025-11-18 13:10:53 |