The Otherwise Motherboard is pleased to announce the selection of two new Otherwise Fellows: author Eugen Bacon and illustrator and comic artist Mars Lauderbaugh.
Eugen Bacon is a writer of black speculative fiction that confronts matters of gender inequality, climate action, social (in)justice, motherhood, family, poverty, domestic violence, sexuality, and racial inequality. Bacon’s fiction playfully defamiliarizes how we understand humanity, gender, and the everyday, by freely imagining alternative worlds and possibilities, with stories that are truly speculative and invite us to see our own world with new eyes. The committee found Bacon’s prose lively and evocative. This fellowship will support her new collection of short stories, Black Dingo, where the literary strange unravels in genre bending Afro-irreal tales of longing and belonging, unlimited futures, queerness and sexuality, a collision of worlds and everything in between, in hues of shadow and light. Upon learning of being awarded an Otherwise Fellowship, Eugen wrote, “I am deeply moved to find myself in this stimulating space of engaging with difference—our world as we know it needs it now more than ever. It’s my hope that readers and publishers will consciously choose to be part of rewarding quality in enabling literature that truly makes a worthy contribution in the characters and themes, such as tradition, belonging, gender, climate action, the ‘other’, betwixt, unlimited futures… it spotlights.”
Mars Lauderbaugh is an artist whose work explores the rich everyday experiences of gender’s expansiveness. In a time where trans and nonbinary kids’ and teens’ rights are under threat across the world, Lauderbaugh’s dynamic and wonderfully illustrated graphic novel projects and book cover art—often featuring genderqueer characters on exciting and fantastical journeys—are rays of hope for the young readers of today and tomorrow. The committee was amazed by Lauderbaugh’s beautiful, committed work. This fellowship will support an upgrade of their working materials so they might continue with their current project, Brighter Stars, which they describe as something they would “want to share with the me of ten years ago, when I was alone and afraid of who I was, frustrated with not fitting into trans space.” Upon learning of being awarded an Otherwise Fellowship, Mars wrote, “This is truly a bright point in the chaos of the past few months.”
In addition to choosing two Fellows, the fellowship committee named poet Erica Rivera and author Issac Kozukhin as honorable mentions. Rivera’s experimental poetry, grappling with autofabulation, technocritique, disability, and the trans-Latinx experience, is unflinching and powerfully written. Kozukhin’s evocative, deftly-written novel-in-progress is a promising exploration of gender fluidity and intersex identity in speculative fiction.
The Otherwise Award celebrates works of speculative fiction that imagine new futures by exploring and expanding our understanding of gender roles. Through the Fellowship program, the Otherwise Motherboard also encourages those who are striving to complete works, to imagine futures that might have been unimaginable when the Otherwise Award began. 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 will create a network of Fellows who can build connections, provide mutual support, and find opportunities for collaboration.
The members of the 2024 selection committee for the Otherwise Fellowships were former Fellows Cat Aquino, Shreya Ila Anasuya, and committee chair (and Motherboard member) Jed Samer. For more on the work of the latest Otherwise Fellows (and on the work of past Fellows), visit the Otherwise Award website.
This blog post also serves as a press release announcing the 2024 Otherwise Fellowship recipients. For more information on the Otherwise Award or this press release, contact Sumana Harihareswara, chair of the Otherwise Award Motherboard, at info@otherwiseaward.org.
Shreya 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.
