Category Archives: Fellowships

Apply for Otherwise Fellowships! …and other news

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We have several news items today:

  • Inviting applications for the 2024 Otherwise Fellows.
  • Announcing our new Motherboard member, Julia Rios.
  • Announcing our new social media accounts.
  • Reminding you to submit recommendations.

The Otherwise Motherboard is now soliciting applications for two 2024 Otherwise Fellows! The Otherwise Fellowship (formerly Tiptree Fellowship) was established in 2015 to support and recognize new voices who are creating work that is changing our view of gender today. The Fellowship program seeks out creators who are striving to complete new works, particularly creators from communities that have been historically underrepresented in the science fiction and fantasy genre and those who are working in media other than traditional fiction! Each Fellow receives USD $500 in support of a new or ongoing project.

Applications are due December 15, 2024, at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time, via email. Selected Fellows will be announced in Spring 2025. The Fellowship committee is being chaired by Otherwise Motherboard member Jed Samer.

For more information about what the Fellowship entails and how to apply, see How to apply.

Julia Rios has joined the Motherboard! Julia (they/them) is a queer, Latinx writer, editor, podcaster, and narrator. They co-edited Kaleidoscope: Diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories, which the jury chose for the 2014 Honor List. Thanks and welcome, Julia!

We’re changing where you can find us on social media. In particular:

  • We’re no longer posting on X/Twitter.
  • You can now follow us on Mastodon.
  • You can now follow us on Bluesky.
  • You can still follow us on Facebook.

Don’t forget to recommend works published in 2024! The form will be open until November 15, but the sooner you submit recommendations, the better.

2022 Otherwise Fellowships

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We are pleased to announce the selection of three new Otherwise Fellows: children’s fiction writer Cat Aquino, speculative fiction writer Naseem Jamnia, and speculative fiction writer and illustrator Dante Luiz.

Cat Aquino is a Filipino children’s fiction writer, currently working on a young adult graphic novel titled Champion of the Rose. This graphic novel is a fantasy reimagining of the centuries-long Spanish colonization of the Philippines and South America, and features two main characters: Rey, a trans “indio” swordsman, and Rosa, a“mestiza” princess. Through the story of these characters, Cat hopes “to explore how the intersections of race, class, trauma, and gender interact, neither favoring one identity pole over the other, to talk about how empires and governments restrict human lives, but can also be defied because of human choices and actions.” Cat will use the fellowship to fund Dominique Duran, illustrator Champion of the Rose‘s illustrator and co-creator. Cat’s work creates BIPOC-led, anti-colonial, and anti-monarchical narratives for young adults.

Naseem Jamnia is a speculative fiction writer whose work contains “unquestioned and undoubted queerness so deeply embedded in the worldbuilding that it can no longer be called queer, and gender is a central focus of that inclusion.” For Naseem, queer genders are central to their fiction, even though their stories are seldom about queerness. They will use the grant money for historical research on non-Western genders that exist outside the binary, in order to better understand the world in which their novella The Bruising of Qilwa (Tachyon Publications 2022) takes place. In Naseem’s novella, “the main character Firuz, an agender nonbinary trans person—who would not use those terms for themself, but rather, call themself a binoh, ‘one without type’—grapples with their responsibilities as a clinician and a magic user in a city overrun by refugees like them. Meanwhile, their younger brother, Parviz, a binary trans boy, is desperate to transition with the magic only Firuz can do in their new home. The issue here is not whether Parviz is actually a boy, or whether Firuz runs the risk of being misgendered; the issue is while the city is in crisis, while an ethnic genocide of Firuz’s people happens in the background, the rest of life continues on and demands Firuz’s attention and time when they’re stretched so thin.” Naseem’s work is “a promise of possibility” and a love letter to their queer, brown communities,

Dante Luiz is a Brazilian speculative fiction writer and illustrator. In the application, Dante wrote about wanting to “write flawed yet humane trans men who are adults, responsible for their actions, both the good and the bad” as a way to combat inadequate and often infantilizing representations of transmasculine people. Dante’s story My Mother’s Hand, which was part of the application as a writing sample, is a historical fantasy set in 19th century Desterro. This story “is a short tale of a trans man dealing with the ghost of his mother possessing his dominant hand—a witch mother who never accepted his gender identity, or his love for women.” Dante is currently working on a graphic novel, Thicker Than Blood, which follows a “trans man who does a Faustian deal with the devil to keep the ancestral land of the family who does not see him as the legitimate heir, and separates him from his former lover and current enemy, a woman after the same land.” He is also working on a Brazilian romantasy novella with a trans man protagonist. Overall, Dante is deeply invested in creating fully-rounded trans characters who find themselves in exciting speculative situations and spaces.

In addition to choosing three Fellows, the Fellowship Committee announced an honor list, which includes L.J. Phillips, Calvin Gimpelevich, A.L. Major, Nicole Martinez, and Eugen Bacon. These writers and artists are all doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction.

The members of the 2022 selection committee for the Otherwise Fellowships were Aqdas Aftab (chair), Shreya Ila Anasuya, and Eleyna Sara Haroun.

Perhaps you noticed that we did not award Fellowships in 2021. In these difficult times, our selection process took longer than usual. We decided it really didn’t make sense to give out 2021 Fellowships in 2022. So to catch up, we skipped a year. Fortunately, we managed to give out the same number of Fellowships by providing three Fellowships in both 2020 and 2021, rather than our usual two. Applications for the 2023 Fellowships will be due in summer 2022.

2020 Otherwise Fellowships Announced

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The Otherwise Award is pleased to announce the selection of three new Fellows. Usually, the Award presents Fellowships to only two emerging creators each year. But because this year has been so difficult for everyone, the Motherboard decided to choose three new Fellows this year. It is a great time to imagine futures that are unlike the world we live in today.

This year’s Fellows are speculative fiction writer Shreya Ila Anasuya, independent filmmaker Eleyna Sara Haroun, and poet FS Hurston.

Shreya Ila AnasuyaShreya Ila Anasuya writes short fiction set in real and imaginary South Asian cities. In the application, Shreya wrote, “I find that my work repeatedly asks this question – who are women and femme people in their fullest manifestations, and how does their experience of themselves contrast to their culture’s expectations and demands of them?” Her work is informed by lived experience as a queer non-binary femme person from India who lives with chronic illness. Funding from the Fellowship will give Shreya the time needed to work on a collection of historical speculative fiction set in South Asia or South Asia inspired secondary worlds. The Fellowship funding will also make it possible for Shreya to take classes that will connect her to the greater speculative fiction community, combating the loneliness of being “a writer of strange fiction in Calcutta during a global pandemic.”

The work of independent filmmaker Eleyna Sara Haroun has focused on encouraging children to to question, challenge and discuss the effects of issues like minority rights, gender equality, climate change and child abuse on their communities and themselves. Her project “Filmwalli” is a series of five short films, to be produced in both Urdu and English. Each story is a folk tale that challenges traditional narratives of women in Pakistani society. These films/folk tales will encourage children to realize that everyone has the right to live to their full potential. Funding from the Otherwise Fellowship will allow Eleyna to develop two out of the five stories into scripts, complete the research and treatments for the other three scripts, and collaborate with a storyboard artist on these tales. With that work in place, she can submit her work to festivals and writers labs and apply for greater funding to begin the animation production of the films and the development of a campaign built around these films.

Poet FS Hurston will be working on a novel in verse with a fascinating main character: a teenager in contemporary Dakar who was born with the memories of a 400-year-old shark. Through this connection with a shark, the teenager meets ghosts of the past. FS Hurston writes that each character in the novel will be based on “a queer trans African person from anthropological archives, journals of slaveowners, colonial administrative documents, slave ledgers. The story will explore “the wide and capacious space of what white anthropologists couldn’t or didn’t want to understand of queer Africans,….speculating on what is possible on the other side of the colonizer’s gaze….” The funding from the Fellowship will help cover the cost of travel in Senegal and Cameroun, the two places where most of the novel takes place.

In addition to choosing three Fellows, the Fellowship Committee announced an honors list, which includes Jasmine Moore, Kailee Marie Pedersen, Timea Balogh, and Wren Handman. These writers and artists are all doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction.

The members of the 2020 selection committee for the Otherwise Fellowships were Martha Riva Palacio Obón, Devonix, Kiini Ibura Salaam, and Betsy Lundsten.

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The Otherwise Award celebrates works of speculative fiction that imagine new futures by exploring and expanding our understanding of gender. Through the Fellowship program, the Award also encourages those who are striving to complete works, to imagine futures that might have been unimaginable when the Award began. Now in its sixth year, the Fellowship program seeks out new voices in the field, particularly from communities that have been historically underrepresented in science fiction and fantasy and by those who work in media other than traditional fiction.

Each Fellow will receive $500. The work produced as a result of this support will be recognized and promoted by the Otherwise Award.

Over time, the Fellowship program is creating a network of Fellows who can build connections, provide mutual support, and find opportunities for collaboration. This effort complements the ongoing work of the Award — that is, the celebration of speculative fiction that expands and explores gender by imagining otherwise in thought-provoking, nuanced, and unexpected ways.

If you would like to donate to the fund for future Otherwise Fellowships, you can do so here. Let us know if you would like your donation to support the Fellowships program specifically.

 

 

 

2020 Otherwise Fellowship Applications Due October 31

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For the sixth year, we are welcoming applications for Otherwise Fellowships: $500 grants for emerging creators who are changing the way we think about gender through speculative narrative.

If you think that description could apply to you — even if you are not working in a format most people would recognize as part of the science fiction or fantasy genre — you are eligible to apply for a Fellowship. Otherwise Fellows can be writers, artists, scholars, media makers, remix artists, performers, musicians, or something else entirely. So far our Fellows have been creators of visual art, performance, poetry, fiction, and games.

The Otherwise Fellowship is designed to provide support and recognition for the new voices who are making visible the forces that are changing our view of gender today. The Fellowship Committee particularly encourages applications from members of communities that have been historically underrepresented in the science fiction and fantasy genre and from creators who are creating speculative narratives in media other than traditional fiction. In keeping with the focus of the Otherwise Award, the selection committee is seeking projects that explore and expand understandings of gender, particularly in relationship to race, nationality, class, disability, sexuality, age, and other factors that set individuals or groups apart as “other.” Fellowship applicants do not need a professional or institutional affiliation, as the intention of the Fellowship program is to support emerging creators who lack institutional support for their work.

Applications are due on October 31. To apply, you will need to write short responses to two questions and to share a sample of your work – you can learn more about the application process at this link.

To read about the work of our previous Fellows, click on their names below:

2019 Fellowship Recipients Announced

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We are pleased to announce the selection of two Otherwise Fellows: Devonix and Martha Riva Palacio Obón.

The 2019 Otherwise Fellowship committee (Rox Samer, Gabriela Damián Miravete, Vida Cruz, and Ana Hurtado) describes their work as follows:

It is our belief that Devonix and Obón’s projects are pushing forward the boundaries and possibilities of the speculative, playing joyously with the traditional sense of el género (which, in Spanish, means genre and gender at the same time) across a range of mediums.

Devonix photographed by Roy Guste

Devonix’s contributions to the New Orleans drag scene challenge how we currently understand and access speculative fiction. In the fusion of genre and drag, Devonix encourages audiences to critique our dystopian reality and imagine other possibilities. Devonix’s drag king performances are fiercely intelligent, provocative, and playful. It is extremely pleasing that the Otherwise Fellowship will be used to further the career of one whose robot overlord performance deconstructs and rearranges like a jenga game how we think of gender.

Martha Riva Palacio Obón

Martha Riva Palacio Obón is a writer and sound and media artist, who creates hybrid projects through words and sound. Her current project seeks to bring her fascination with outer space into inner space. Human and non-human memories, her grandmother’s voice and the chirping of crickets, her own body and voice, all meld into a fascinating exploration of the space a body occupies. Obón erases the line we constantly draw between us and them: our bodies and planet Earth, our consciousness and an expanding galaxy, our sense of self and every single being surrounding us.

We are also proud to announce an honors list, which includes Marina Berlin, M.L. Krishnan, Kailee Pedersen, and Aigner Loren Wilson. The committee is extremely excited by the work these writers and artists are doing in gender and speculative fiction and look forward to following its development.

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The Fellowship program, now in its fifth year, is designed to provide support and recognition for the new voices who are changing our view of gender today. Each Fellow will receive $500. The work produced as a result of this support will be recognized and promoted by the Otherwise Award.

Over time, the Fellowship program will create a network of Fellows who can build connections, provide mutual support, and find opportunities for collaboration. This effort will complement the ongoing work of the Award — that is, the celebration of speculative fiction that expands and explores gender by imagining otherwise in thought-provoking, nuanced, and unexpected ways.

If you would like to donate to the fund for future Otherwise Fellowships, you can do so here. Let us know if you would like your donation to support the Fellowships program specifically.

To read about the work of our previous Fellows, click on their names below.

2019 Otherwise Fellowship Applications Due October 31

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For the fifth year, the Tiptree Award is welcoming applications for Tiptree Fellowships: $500 grants for emerging creators who are changing the way we think about gender through speculative narrative.

If you think that description could apply to you — even if you are not working in a format most people would recognize as part of the science fiction or fantasy genre — you are eligible to apply for a Fellowship. Tiptree Fellows can be writers, artists, scholars, media makers, remix artists, performers, musicians, or something else entirely. So far our Fellows have been creators of visual art, poetry, fiction, and games.

The Tiptree Fellowship is designed to provide support and recognition for the new voices who are making visible the forces that are changing our view of gender today. The Fellowship Committee particularly encourages applications from members of communities that have been historically underrepresented in the science fiction and fantasy genre and from creators who are creating speculative narratives in media other than traditional fiction. In keeping with the focus of the Tiptree Award, the selection committee is seeking projects that explore and expand understandings of gender, particularly in relationship to race, nationality, class, disability, sexuality, age, and other factors that set individuals or groups apart as “other.” Fellowship applicants do not need a professional or institutional affiliation, as the intention of the Fellowship program is to support emerging creators who lack institutional support for their work.

Applications are due on October 31, 2019. To apply, you will need to write short responses to two questions and to share a sample of your work – you can learn more about the application process at this link.

To read about the work of our previous Fellows, click on their names below:

The 2019 Fellows will be chosen by Rox Samer (committee chair), Gabriela Damián Miravete, Ana Hurtado, and Vida Cruz.

2018 Fellowship Recipients Announced

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We are pleased to announce the selection of two Tiptree Fellows: Vida Cruz and Ana Hurtado.

Vida Cruz is a Clarion graduate and the first Filipina to win first place in the Writers of the Future contest. She was born in the Philippines and is currently based there.

In her application, Cruz described the many faces of feminism and resistance in the Philippines: “Together, warrior, witness, writer, and witch amount to a uniquely Filipino feminist identity that live on in strains despite the erasure of colonization. I hope to reclaim and round these out by telling stories led by such characters.” Funding from the Tiptree Fellowship will help Cruz continue her work on an ongoing series of alternate-history stories set in a present-day Philippines inhabited by Filipinos and local mythological creatures. Each story is written as a feature article by a sharp-eyed Filipina journalist who seeks to heal and galvanize her society by writing and bearing witness, and eventually by becoming a warrior and perhaps even a witch.

Cruz’s fiction has appeared in LONTAR (The Journal of Southeast Asian speculative fiction), Expanded Horizons, Broad Knowledge: 35 Women Up to No Good, Kathang Haka: The Big Book of Fake News, the Philippine Speculative Fiction series, and Phantazein.

Ana Hurtado holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University and is a professor of English at Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador. Her work has been published in Uncanny, Strange Horizons, Noble/Gas Qtrly, RHINO Poetry, and other publications. Her writing falls under the genre of magical realism and reflects a blending of Andalusian traditions, indigenous cosmovision, and African mythology, all shaped by Hurtado’s Venezuelan origin and location in Ecuador.

In her application, Hurtado wrote about the role of ghosts in her young-adult novel-in-progress: “In this novel, gender is explored in the ‘real’ world and ‘ghost’ world; when these two collide, we understand how sexuality is fluid..…. With an entire cast of ghosts, my young adult novel wants to highlight the pre-Columbian cosmovision of ancestors: ancestors, like ghosts, never leave us – they are forever between us and with us, sharing their ancestral knowledge and guessing our future.”

The Fellowship Committee also awarded honorable mentions to Eleanna Castroianni, Theresa Hottel, Lulu Kadhim, Zora Mai Quynh, and Courtney Young.

The Tiptree Fellowship program, now in its fourth year, is designed to provide support and recognition for the new voices who are changing our view of gender today. Each Fellow will receive $500. The work produced as a result of this support will be recognized and promoted by the Tiptree Award.

Over time, the Fellowship program will create a network of Fellows who can build connections, provide mutual support, and find opportunities for collaboration. This effort will complement the ongoing work of the Award — that is, the celebration of speculative fiction that expands and explores gender roles in thought-provoking, imaginative, and occasionally infuriating ways.

The members of the 2018 selection committee for the Tiptree Fellowships were the 2017 Tiptree Fellows, H. Pueyo and Ineke Chen-Meyer, past Tiptree honoree Julie Phillips, and Motherboard member Gretchen Treu.

If you would like to donate to the fund for future Tiptree Fellowships, you can do so here. Let us know if you would like your donation to support the Fellowships program specifically.

To read about the work of our previous Fellows, click on their names below.

 

Applications for Otherwise Fellowships due October 31

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For the fourth year, the Tiptree Award is welcoming applications for Tiptree Fellowships: $500 grants for emerging creators who are changing the way we think about gender through speculative narrative.

If you think that description could apply to you — even if you are not working in a format most people would recognize as the science fiction or fantasy genre — you are eligible to apply for a Fellowship. Tiptree Fellows can be writers, artists, scholars, media makers, remix artists, performers, musicians, or something else entirely; so far our Fellows have been creators of visual art, poetry, fiction, and games.

The Tiptree Fellowship is designed to provide support and recognition for the new voices who are making visible the forces that are changing our view of gender today. The Fellowship Committee particularly encourages applications from members of communities that have been historically underrepresented in the science fiction and fantasy genre and from creators who are creating speculative narratives in media other than traditional fiction. In keeping with the focus of the Tiptree Award, the selection committee is seeking projects that explore and expand understandings of gender, particularly in relationship to race, nationality, class, disability, sexuality, age, and other factors that set individuals or groups apart as “other.” Fellowship applicants do not need a professional or institutional affiliation, as the intention of the Fellowship program is to support emerging creators who lack institutional support for their work.

The deadline is coming up soon, but there is still plenty of time to submit – applications are due on October 31. To apply, you will need to write short responses to two questions and to share a sample of your work – you can learn more about the application process at this link.

To read about the work of our previous Fellows, click on their names below:

 

Fellowship Recipients Announced

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We are pleased to announce the selection of two Tiptree Fellows for the upcoming year: H. Pueyo and Ineke Chen-Meyer.

H. Pueyo is a South American writer and occasional comic artist. Born in Brazil to an Argentine father and a Brazilian mother, she is of Uruguayan descent. During her childhood and teen years, she has lived or stayed in many different cities, including Barcelona, Brasília, and Buenos Aires.

Pueyo writes that her “ambitions with writing genre fiction are mostly focused on bringing Latin American culture and realities to a broader, international audience inside the speculative (and sometimes literary) fiction market.” She notes that her writing themes vary, “but usually include subjects close to home, such as multiculturalism in Latin America, uncomfortably violent things, multiracial backgrounds, and her family’s spiritual beliefs”. Her work has been published in several comic anthologies, and magazines such as Mad Scientist Journal, Luna Station Quarterly, FLAPPERHOUSE, and Bourbon Penn, among others. Her fellowship will support improvements to her workspace, which will improve her quality of life and ability to freelance and write.

Ineke Chen-Meyer writes genderbending historical fiction about Chinese emperors, Mongol warriors, and tormented eunuch generals. Also, occasionally, lesbians in space.

An Australian by way of Malaysia and New Zealand, Chen-Meyer is currently finishing her first novel, She Who Became the Sun, which she describes as “a genderbending alt-history that takes male-centered, male-authored Chinese imperial history and makes it defiantly queer.” She writes:

“First and foremost, I wrote this book for myself and people like me. It is a story for members of the English-speaking Chinese diaspora who so rarely see respectful portrayals of themselves in Western-published speculative fiction. It is for queer audiences who have been denied queerness in the global phenomenon of East Asian TV dramas. And it is for Western audiences who might only have experienced the Asian crossdressing trope in Disney’s Mulan, but are compelled by the thought of the epic rise to power of a queer protagonist.”

Chen-Meyer will use her fellowship to access formal language studies to gain a strong understanding of Chinese grammar to inform the dialogue in her work.

The Fellowship Committee also awarded honorable mentions to Julian K. Jarboe and Lilliam Rivera.

The Tiptree Fellowship program, now in its third year, is designed to provide support and recognition for the new voices who are making visible the forces that are changing our view of gender today. Each Fellow will receive $500. The work produced as a result of this support will be recognized and promoted by the Tiptree Award.

Over time, the Fellowship program will create a network of Fellows who can build connections, provide mutual support, and find opportunities for collaboration. This effort will complement the on-going work of the Award — that is, the celebration of speculative fiction that expands and explores gender roles in thought-provoking, imaginative, and occasionally infuriating ways.

The members of the 2017 selection committee for the Tiptree Fellowships were Mia Sereno, Porpentine Charity Heartscape, Pat Schmatz, and Gretchen Treu.

If you would like to donate to the fund for future Tiptree Fellowships, you can do so here. Let us know if you would like your donation to support the Fellowships program specifically.

To read about the work of our previous Fellows, click on their names below.

 

Applications for Otherwise Fellowships due September 15

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For the third year, we are welcoming applications for Tiptree Fellowships: $500 grants for emerging creators who are changing the way we think about gender through speculative narrative.

If you think that description could apply to you — even if you are not working in a format most people would recognize as the science fiction or fantasy genre — you are eligible to apply for a Fellowship. Tiptree Fellows can be writers, artists, scholars, media makers, remix artists, performers, musicians, or something else entirely; so far our Fellows have been creators of visual art, poetry, fiction, and games.

The Tiptree Fellowship is designed to provide support and recognition for the new voices who are making visible the forces that are changing our view of gender today. The Fellowship Committee particularly encourages applications from members of communities that have been historically underrepresented in the science fiction and fantasy genre and from creators who are creating speculative narratives in media other than traditional fiction. In keeping with the focus of the Tiptree Award, the selection committee is seeking projects that explore and expand understandings of gender, particularly in relationship to race, nationality, class, disability, sexuality, age, and other factors that set individuals or groups apart as “other.” Fellowship applicants do not need a professional or institutional affiliation, as the intention of the Fellowship program is to support emerging creators who lack institutional support for their work.

The deadline is coming up soon, but there is still plenty of time to submit – applications are due on September 15. To apply, you will need to write short responses to two questions and to share a sample of your work – you can learn more about the application process at this link.

The selection committee for the 2017 Tiptree Fellowships will be Gretchen Treu (chair), Mia Sereno, Porpentine Charity Heartscape, and Pat Schmatz.

To read about the work of our previous Fellows, click on their names below: