Things are proceeding apace with the awards for works published in 2024. Jury members have been reading and considering recommended works, and we’re expecting that they’ll make their decisions within the next couple of months.

Our recommendation form is now open for works published in 2025. Let us know about the sf works you’re appreciating that explore or expand our understanding of gender! (Works can be books, stories, music, video, fanfic, social media posts, or any other form of speculative fiction.)

We’re bidding a fond farewell to a longtime dedicated member of the Motherboard: Gretchen Treu has volunteered as a member of the Motherboard for a decade, especially focusing on supporting the book acquisition process for the Award jury. They will continue to offer advice to the Award in other capacities. Thanks, Gretchen, for your years of service and support of the Award; we’ll miss you on the Motherboard!

WisCon will be online this year, May 23-26. We will almost certainly hold a few Otherwise events during the con, but we haven’t worked out details yet; more to come, probably next month. (More about this year’s convention at WisCon’s virtual town hall on Wednesday, February 19th!)

This year we completed an update to our bylaws to bring them into the 21st century; no longer does notice of board meetings need to be delivered via first-class postal mail, in person, or by “telephone or telegraph.”

A note to past honorees and volunteers: if you have changed the name that you go by, we want to honor that. If we mention your old name on our website and you’d prefer that we update it, or add a note mentioning your new name (example), please contact us so we can change the record appropriately.

Also: Given the current political atmosphere (in the United States as well as elsewhere), there is increased potential threat to marginalized people, possibly including stalking and harassment, as well as concerns about persecution by governments. In response, we’re examining and improving our data security and retention processes. And we recognize that, in response, some past Otherwise honorees or volunteers may be reducing how much information about them is available publicly on the web. If our website includes information about you that you would like for us to remove entirely or redact, please contact us so we can figure out how to make that change appropriately.

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.

As has been the case for many volunteer-run organizations, the Otherwise Award has struggled since the start of the pandemic in 2020. Our (volunteer) board and other volunteers have had to juggle many more issues than previously around health, paid work, and caretaking concerns than previously, which has resulted in our falling behind on the administration and maintenance of the Award. We’re sorry that we didn’t communicate about this earlier—that made it hard for readers, authors, and publishers to know what to expect.

Our Motherboard met recently to discuss how to move forward. We remain dedicated to our mission: to celebrate science fiction, fantasy, and other forms of speculative narrative that expand and explore our understanding of gender . But we’re discussing how, as an organization, to continue to pursue that mission in a sustainable way, given our limited resources.

Here are the decisions we’ve made so far.

Most of our programs are paused. This is us acknowledging what’s already been happening. We were later than usual at deliberating and announcing the Awards for work published in 2020 and in 2021, and did not run a Fellowships process in 2021 or 2023. We have not yet convened a jury to consider works published in 2022, 2023, or 2024.

We intend to run the Fellowships this year. We will open applications in several months—August at the earliest, October at the latest.

We may honor 2022 and 2023 work in a different way. We’re exploring various approaches to celebrating work from those years. That celebration may end up taking a very different form than usual.

We’re considering alternative approaches to the Award in the future. It could be that we’ll convene a jury soon to read 2024 work and deliberate towards an Award, but if we do, we may change our practices to reduce the workload on individual jury members and to make our procurement system for recommended works less laborious. Also, we currently rely on volunteer work for almost all of the organization’s labor (exceptions being technological work on our website, and art commissioned to give to Award winners); we may try to find ways to focus more on paid labor.

We’ll be at Readercon. We usually honor the most recent Award winner at WisCon, but this year we have no new award winner, and WisCon is taking a break. So we will instead hold some Otherwise-related events at Readercon (July 11-14, 2024, near Boston, Massachusetts). Specifics to be determined. Edited on July 10 to delete this item; it turns out that, due to illness, we’re unable to have a presence at Readercon.

We’ll say more soon. Within the next few months, we’ll have further announcements about our activities, and will announce them on this blog, on our mailing list, and on social media.

Thank you for your support for the Award.

-Sumana Harihareswara, Motherboard chair

We bring to your attention books and short stories published in 2023 by creators whose works have previously won the Otherwise (formerly Tiptree) Award, and our past Fellows. As nomination and voting deadlines get closer for awards for 2023 work (Feb. 28th is the nomination deadline for the Nebulas!), consider adding these to your reading list:

• Eleanor Arnason, whose A Woman of the Iron People won the 1991 award, wrote “Mr. Catt” which was published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March/April 2023. The digital edition is available for sale from Weightless Books.
• Maureen F. McHugh, whose China Mountain Zhang, won the 1992 award, wrote “Prospect Heights”, published in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 50.
• Elizabeth Hand, whose Waking the Moon also won the 1992 award, wrote the novel A Haunting on the Hill, which you can buy from Room of One’s Own. Hand also wrote “The Seventh Bride, or Female Curiosity”, published in A Darker Shade: New Stories of Body Horror by Women Writers(available from Room of One’s Own).
• Kelly Link , whose Travels With the Snow Queen won the 1997 award, wrote two pieces of short fiction, “Prince Hat Underground” and “The White Road”, which were published in the collection White Cat, Black Dog (available from Room of One’s Own).
• Candas Jane Dorsey, whose Black Wine won the 1997 award, wrote the novel He Wasn’t There Again Today (available from Room of One’s Own).
• John Kessel, whose Stories for Men won the 2002 award, co-wrote “Money in the Bank”, published in Lightspeed, September 2023.
• M. John Harrison, whose Light won the 2002 award, wrote the nonfiction book Wish I Was Here.
• Matt Ruff, whose Set This House in Order: A Romance of Souls won the 2003 award, wrote the novel The Destroyer of Worlds: A Return to Lovecraft Country (available from Room of One’s Own).
• Joe Haldeman, whose Camouflage won the 2003 award, wrote the poem 19 April 2021 (Kitty Hawk II), published in Asimov’s Science Fiction in the January-February 2023 issue (available from Magzter).
• Geoff Ryman, whose Air: Or, Have Not Have won the 2005 award, wrote the novel Him (available from Room of One’s Own).
• Catherynne M. Valente, whose The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden won the 2006 award, wrote the short story “Can You Hear Me Now?”, published in issue 54 of Uncanny Magazine, and wrote “The Sin-Eater” [a variant of The Sin of America (2021)], published in The Best of Catherynne M. Valente: Volume One .
• Nisi Shawl, whose Filter House won the 2008 award, wrote the novel Speculation (available from Room of One’s Own), and the short story “Sun River” (published in Reactor, formerly Tor.com; a version of “Sun River” appeared in Clockwork Cairo: Steampunk Tales of Egypt in 2017) ,and edited the anthology New Suns 2: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color (available from Room Of One’s Own).
• Fumi Yoshinaga, whose Ooku: The Inner Chambers, volumes 1 & 2 won the 2009 award, wrote the comic What Did You Eat Yesterday? volume 20 (you can order from Room of One’s Own).
• Dubravka Ugresic, whose Baba Yaga Laid an Egg won the 2010 award, had the collection Lend Me Your Character published (available from Room Of One’s Own).
• Nike A. Sulway, whose Rupetta won the 2013 award, wrote the short fiction piece “Saltwater Story”, published in The Librarian Card Catalogue.
• micha cárdenas, 2013 Fellow, wrote the novel Atoms Never Touch (available from Room Of One’s Own).
• Anna-Marie McLemore, whose When the Moon Was Ours won the 2016 award, wrote the novel Venom & Vow (available from Room of One’s Own).
• H. Pueyo, 2016 Fellow, wrote the short fiction piece “Crawling Back to You”, published in Kaleidotrope, and the short fiction piece “Glory Hounds”, published in Interzone #295 (digital edition available from Weightless Books).
• Shelley Parker-Chan, 2016 Fellow, wrote the novel He Who Drowned The World (available from Room Of One’s Own).
• Ana Hurtado, 2016 Fellow, wrote several short pieces of fiction: “Murciélago“, published in Strange Horizons; “Parásito”, published in Wilted Pages: An Anthology of Dark Academia; “Zoraida la Zorra”, published in the magazine The Dark; “Esqueleto”, published in Uncanny Magazine Issue 55.
• Akwaeke Emezi, whose Freshwater won the 2019 award, wrote the novel You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty (available from Room of One’s Own).
• Martha Riva Palacio Obón, 2019 Fellow, wrote the fiction book Secrets We Tell the Sea (available from Room Of One’s Own).
• Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, whose Ife-Iyoku, the Tale of Imadeyunuagbon won the 2020 award, wrote “Mother’s Love, Father’s Place”, published in Galaxy’s EdgeIssue 60, and “The Magazine of Horror”, published in Apex Magazine.
• Shreya Ila Anasuya, 2020 Fellow, wrote the short fiction piece “Playing MacBeth at the Electra Theatre on Beadon Street”, published in the anthology Infinite Constellations: An Anthology of Identity, Culture, and Speculative Conjunctions (available from Room of One’s Own).

We’re bidding a fond farewell to some of our longtime dedicated volunteers, and welcoming two new members of the Motherboard.

We’d like to thank the following people for their years of service and support of the award:

• Alexis Lothian was the chair of the Motherboard until 2022, and had been a Motherboard member since 2012.
• Kate Schaefer had been managing our mailing list for years—sending out emails to the list, adding and removing people on request, and more.
• Liz Henry had been on the Motherboard since 2021, and was the chair of the jury for the 2005 and 2020 awards.
• Pat Murphy is one of the Founding Mothers of the award, having co-founded it with Karen Joy Fowler in 1991, and had served on the Motherboard since that founding.

We’ll miss all of them, and we look forward to seeing what they do next.

We’d also like to welcome our new Motherboard members:

• Jed Samer is a feminist, queer, and trans media and cultural studies scholar; remix artist; and documentary filmmaker.
• Jed Hartman is an editor and writer of fiction and nonfiction.

It’s not too late to recommend works for the Otherwise Award!

If you want to recommend a work of science fiction or fantasy that explores or expands our notions of gender and that was published in 2023, fill in the recommendation form on or before December 31.

The bottom of that page lists the works that have already been recommended for the 2023 award.

(You can also recommend 2022 publications that weren’t considered for the 2022 award. To see what works were considered for the 2022 award, see the 2022 recommendations list.)

After December 31, you can make recommendations for next year’s award. (The 2023 recommendation form will be closed, and there will be a new recommendations page for the 2024 award.)

Come join us in celebrating the 2021 Otherwise Award winners at WisCon next week!

WisCon is an annual science fiction convention with a focus on feminism and social justice, held in Madison, Wisconsin, USA. This year’s convention runs from May 26 through May 29.

WisCon is capping its in-person membership at 600 people this year, and they have only a few of those in-person memberships remaining. So if you want to attend in person, register as soon as you can.

Alternatively, you can register to attend the online parts of WisCon. There’s no cap on online attendance.

This year, as usual, the convention’s program will include several panels and other events related to the Otherwise Award, including the traditional live auction on Saturday night to benefit the Award.

Program items listed in this post are in-person except where marked as online.

Celebrating the winners

The winners of the Otherwise Award for 2021 were Light from Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki, and Sorrowland, by Rivers Solomon.

Aoki and Solomon will both be at WisCon 2023 in person. We’ll celebrate them and their winning novels on Sunday night of the convention, during the Dessert Salon, with a brief awards ceremony. We’ll present both authors with their awards and the most important Otherwise accoutrement: chocolate.

(The award for 2021 was announced early in 2023 rather than in 2022, for pandemic and other reasons. The award for 2022 will be announced later in 2023.)

Other panels and program events related to the award

Two panels that are specifically relevant to the Otherwise Award:

• Otherwise Award 2021 and Beyond (Sun 1:00 PM–2:15 PM CDT), discussing such topics as:
  • The 2021 winners and Honor List.
  • Trends in the handling of gender in speculative fiction.
  • Plans for the award to catch up from pandemic delays.
• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in SF/F (Sat 2:30 PM–3:45 PM CDT), which will discuss Otherwise as well as many other organizations.

Rivers Solomon’s panels

Rivers Solomon will be on the following program items:

• Guest of Honor reading and reception (Thurs 6:00 PM–8:00 PM CDT)—Solomon is one of this year’s Guests of Honor at WisCon.
• Fighting the Good Fight with Limited Resources (Fri 1:00 PM–2:15 PM CDT)
• Healing From Cissupremacy (online; Fri 4:00 PM–5:15 PM CDT)
• Opening Ceremonies (Fri 5:30 PM–6:00 PM CDT)
• Too Disabled to Labor? (Sat 1:00 PM–2:15 PM CDT)
• Colonialism and the Social Sciences (Sat 2:30 PM–3:45 PM CDT)
• Guest of Honor Reading: Rivers Solomon (Sun 10:00 AM–11:15 AM CDT)
• Abolition and Transformation (Sun 1:00 PM–2:15 PM CDT)
• What We’ve Gained and What We Grieve (Sun 2:30 PM–3:45 PM CDT)
• Guest of Honor Speeches & Otherwise Ceremony (both in-person and livestreamed; Sun 8:00 PM–9:00 PM CDT)
• The SignOut Autograph Party (Mon 11:30 AM–12:30 PM CDT)

In addition, the following program items will include discussion of Solomon’s work:

• The Fiction of Rivers Solomon (online; Fri 4:00 PM–5:15 PM CDT)
• Generational Trauma in Rivers Solomon’s Fiction (Sat 1:00 PM–2:15 PM CDT)
• Sea & Sky: Spaces of Black Liberation & Dreams (Sun 4:00 PM–5:15 PM CDT)

Ryka Aoki’s panels

Ryka Aoki will be on the following program items:

• Fighting the Good Fight with Limited Resources (Fri 1:00 PM–2:15 PM CDT)
• Healing from Cissupremacy (online; Fri 4:00 PM–5:15 PM CDT)
• Opening Ceremonies (Fri 5:30 PM–6:00 PM CDT)
• Otherwise Award Winner Reading: Ryka Aoki (Fri 9:00 PM–10:15 PM CDT)
• Nonviolence in SF/F (Sat 10:00 AM–11:15 AM CDT)
• Redemption 2: Beyond Good and Evil (online; Sun 2:30 PM–3:45 PM CDT)
• Guest of Honor Speeches & Otherwise Ceremony (both in-person and livestreamed; Sun 8:00 PM–9:00 PM CDT)
• The SignOut Autograph Party (Mon 11:30 AM–12:30 PM CDT)

Aoki was added to the program late, so may not be listed in some printed or online program listings, but will be listed in errata for each day.

Fundraising auction

Our fabulous live auction will be on Saturday evening of the convention (7:30 PM–9:30 PM CDT), featuring fabulous auctioneer Sumana Harihareswara. It will be livestreamed, but only in-person attendees will be able to bid.

Items to be auctioned include the following:

• A signed copy of 1998 Otherwise Award winner Raphael Carter’s novel The Fortunate Fall, which is currently out of print, donated by the author. (The author has since transitioned and is now Cameron Reed.)



• A ’zine created by Sumana: Quill & Scroll.



• Dead in the Scrub (A Shirley McClintock Mystery) by B.J. Oliphant, a pseudonym of Sheri S. Tepper, donated by Sigrid Ellis.
• A first edition of Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, donated by Heather Rose Jones.
• An item to benefit the Carl Brandon Society: a lot of three handspun yarns and a project bag, all made by Carl Brandon Society co-founder Candra K. Gill. These fine-weight skeins include a tonal blue Merino & jewel-toned rainbow sparkle Merino/Cashmere/Stellina (80/10/10), each spun from fiber dyed by women of color fiber artists and a one-of-a-kind mini-skein of mill-end wool mixed with other fibers that Candra blended herself. (Note that these were made in a cat-friendly home.)





• Keepsake bookmarks.

And lots more!

For those of you attending WisCon in person, auction items will be displayed ahead of time at the Gathering on Friday of the convention.

Hope to catch you—in person or online—at WisCon!

We bring to your attention books and short stories published in 2022 by past Otherwise Award winners. As nomination and voting deadlines get closer for awards for 2022 work (Feb. 28th is the nomination deadline for the Nebulas!), consider adding these to your reading list:

• Eleanor Arnason, 1991 winner for A Woman of the Iron People, wrote the short story “Grandmother’s Troll,” published in Asimov’s Science Fiction in the September/October 2022 issue. You can buy that issue digitally on Magzter. The print issue may be available from Asimov’s.
• Maureen F. McHugh, 1992 winner for China Mountain Zhang, wrote the short story “The Goldfish Man,” published in Uncanny Magazine in March 2022. You can read it for free on Uncanny‘s website.
• Elizabeth Hand, 1995 winner for Waking the Moon, wrote the novel Hokuloa Road, published by Mulholland Books on July 19, 2022. You can order it from Room of One’s Own Bookstore.
• Geoff Ryman, 2005 winner for Air: Or, Have Not Have, wrote the short story “Not Best Pleased,” published on February 15, 2022 as part of the book Vital Signals. You can buy the book from Bookshop.org.
• Catherynne M. Valente, 2006 winner for The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden, wrote the novel Osmo Unknown and the Eightpenny Woods, published by Margaret K. McElderry Books on April 26, 2022. You can buy the book from Bookshop.org. Also, Valente wrote the short story “The Difference Between Love and Time,” published on May 10, 2022 as part of the book Someone in Time. That book can be purchased at Room of One’s Own Bookstore.
• Nisi Shawl, 2008 winner for Filter House, wrote the short story collection Our Fruiting Bodies, published by Aqueduct Press in November 2022. You can purchase it directly from Aqueduct Press.
• Anna-Marie McLemore, 2016 winner for When the Moon Was Ours, wrote the novel Lakelore, published by Feiwel & Friends on March 8, 2022. You can buy the book from Room of One’s Own Bookstore. McLemore also wrote the novel Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix, published by Feiwel & Friends on September 6, 2022. This book can be purchased from Bookshop.org.
• Akwaeke Emezi, 2019 winner for Freshwater, wrote the novel You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty, published by Atria Books on January 25, 2022. You can buy the book from Room of One’s Own Bookstore. Also, Emezi wrote the novel Bitter, published by Knopf Books for Young Readers on February 15, 2022. You can order it from Room of One’s Own Bookstore.
• Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, 2020 winner for “Ife-Iyoku, the Tale of Imadeyunuagbon”, co-edited the anthology “Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction”, published by Tordotcom on November 15, 2022. You can purchase it from Room of One’s Own Bookstore. Also, Ekpeki published the short story “Destiny Delayed,” published in the May/June 2022 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. You can buy that issue digitally on Magzter or contact the magazine to try to purchase it in print.