The Otherwise Award’s Motherboard is seeking two new members. Please consider applying, or sharing this with others!

The Motherboard – what other nonprofits would call a Board of Directors – guides and leads the Otherwise Award Council, making decisions about policies and programs, and more generally on the direction that the Award and the Fellowships take. Currently there are five of us.

As a Motherboard member, you would commit to making the Otherwise Award a priority for at least one two-year term. (You can continue for multiple terms if you want to.)

The Motherboard is unpaid.

Role requirements

To become a Motherboard member, you must be:

• Interested in gender issues and speculative fiction.
• Onboard with intersectional feminism.
• Collegial, and able to manage disagreements in a spirit of good faith.
• Reliable and reachable. If you find you can’t fulfill a commitment, you communicate about it immediately. You usually have reliable Internet access.
• Willing to keep confidential things confidential – for example, we know the names of Award winners for a short period before we publicly announce them.
• Willing to publicly be named as a Motherboard member, such as on our website.

We also especially encourage candidates who fit one or more of the following:

• Live outside the United States.
• Face marginalization in some way because of their identity, such as race, gender, gender expression, disability, or other dimensions.
• Have participated in public conversation on gender and speculative fiction—on social media, in academic work, at conventions, on podcasts, or elsewhere.
• Create, edit, publish, market, write about, or otherwise participate in speculative fiction other than written prose, such as games, music, film, video, poetry, or comics.

Specific duties

This is a summary, and different board members do carry out the role differently. Board chair Sumana Harihareswara is happy to converse with prospective candidates to share more detail about our processes and what might work as a set of duties for you; email info@otherwiseaward.org to ask!

Required

• Attend Motherboard meetings. (2-6 meetings/year, ~1 hour each, videocalls, scheduled for members’ convenience.)
• Participate in high-level decisionmaking in meetings and email, on topics such as jury member invitations, contractor hiring, and policy questions. (For example, the Motherboard decided on our Otherwise Award process changes in 2024.) If you’re going to be unavailable for over a week and won’t be able to reply to email in that timeframe, let us know ahead of time.

Preferred

• Work on the organization’s projects for about 3 hours/month. For example:
  • Write blog posts/newsletters/social media posts, or make graphics.
  • Represent the organization at events (virtually or in person).
  • Respond to external communication, such as email sent to our general info@ address.
  • Share fundraising requests with your social and professional networks.

Ideal

• Manage or run some of the organization’s projects. For example, you could manage one or more of the following ongoing needs:
  • Put together the Award jury, and liaise with them during their deliberations.
  • Chair the Fellowship jury, evaluating and selecting Fellow candidates.
  • Track incoming recommendations for works to consider.
  • Manage our paid part-time contract workers.
  • Raise funds (such as through bake sales, grants, auctions, online crowdfunding, soliciting individual donations, or merchandise sales).
  • Document processes.
  • Serve as liaison to treasurer.
  • Manage our website and other Internet stuff.
• Propose high-level additions or changes to our work, such as bylaws changes or new programs.

Context

For sustainability, we want to grow our current board from 5 to 7. Some current board members want the flexibility to potentially leave within the next few years, and we want to nurture future replacements to our current Chair (Sumana Harihareswara, who has been Chair for over five years now).

We have a fairly standard set of bylaws for a California-registered 501(c)3 nonprofit. Our budget is under USD $10,000 per year. We don’t have any paid full-time staff; volunteers, including board members, do most of the organization’s work, though we do pay for some specialized work such as accounting. Motherboard members collaborate via email, phone calls, and videocalls, rarely meeting in person since we’re so distributed, but if we can make it to WisCon in Madison, we try to meet there. Our board discussions are calm and productive, and we find productive ways through any disagreements.

Why you might want to do this

You’ll help maintain a small but steady part of the infrastructure of inclusion in speculative fiction. You’ll get a new line on your CV/résumé. You’ll get a behind-the-scenes understanding of forces and structures affecting our fields, such as publishing schedules, organizations’ budgets, publicity and fundraising dynamics, changes in career possibilities for authors, and competing access needs. You’ll get to work with thoughtful, funny people who share your values. You’ll have a new tool at your disposal to start conversations with sf/f people and institutions. You could come up with an idea for a new way we could be encouraging and celebrating speculative fiction that expands our notions of gender, and then implement it.

And there’s the small secret pleasure of knowing who the Award and Fellowship winners are before they do, and before the public finds out.

How to apply

Please apply by December 1st by sending us an application email at info@otherwiseaward.org. In it, please write a few paragraphs about your past experience that would help you be a board member and why you’re interested in serving, and share some good dates and times for a conversation (probably by videocall) with a current board member. We may follow up with requests for more information, such as references, before scheduling a call. And in any case, thank you for being interested in helping serve our mission!

The Otherwise Motherboard is pleased to announce the Otherwise Awards 2026 Jury:

• Gautam Bhatia (Chair) is an Indian SFF writer, reviewer, and editor. He is the author of THE FIFTH INFLECTION (Saga Press/Solaris 2027). Originally published in India as THE SENTENCE, the novel won the 2025 Ignyte Award for best adult fiction. His other novels include the duology THE WALL and THE HORIZON (HarperCollins India). He is also the co-ordinating editor of Strange Horizons, a Hugo Award-winning weekly, online magazine of SFF that is in its 27th year of existence. His critical and editorial work focuses on SFF from the global south, extractivism in SFF, anarchist SFF, and more. In his other life, he is a constitutional lawyer.
• Abigail Nussbaum is a blogger and critic, former reviews editor of Strange Horizons, and a two-time winner of the Hugo award for Best Fan Writer. Her writing has appeared in the Guardian, the New Scientist, Locus, io9, and others, and she contributes to the politics blog Lawyers, Guns, & Money. Her review collection Track Changes was published by Briardene Books in 2024.
• Akankshya Abismruta (she/her) is an independent books & culture writer based in India. She writes for numerous Indian newspapers and several digital platforms, including Strange Horizons. She is interested in all things gender, illness and disability, and translation. She lives with multiple chronic conditions and invisible disability, and copes by reading stories that disrupt power structures. She is @geekyliterati on Instagram and @akankshya.bsky.social on Bluesky.
• Three other jury members have asked not to be named publicly until the end of the jury process. For more about our public naming of jurors, see below.

The jury is now considering works for the 2026 Awards, and will announce its decisions by late May 2027; we intend to celebrate Award winners at WisCon 2027.

The main way that the jury finds out about works to consider is your recommendations. Our recommendation form is open for works published in 2026. Let us know about the sf works you’re appreciating that explore or expand our understanding of gender! (Works can be books, stories, poems, music, video, fanfic, social media posts, or any other form of speculative fiction.)

A transparency note about naming jurors publicly:

In the past, we’ve announced the name of the jury chair at the beginning of each year’s Awards cycle, but haven’t publicly named the members of the jury until the end of the process.

Last year and this year, we learned that some jurors want to be publicly named at the start of the cycle, and others don’t, for a mix of reasons (all sensible). So this year, we’re refining our process, and naming only the jurors who want to be named.

When we announce this year’s Awards around May 2027, we’ll also provide the names of all of the jurors.

Thanks to all our jurors for serving!

We bring to your attention books, short stories, essays, poems, and other works published in 2025 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 2025 work (March 28th is the nomination deadline for the Hugos!), consider adding these to your reading list:

• Eleanor Arnason, whose A Woman of the Iron People won the 1991 Award, edited The Outspoken and the Incendiary: Interviews with Radical Speculative Fiction Writers
• Nicola Griffith, whose Ammonite won the 1993 Award, wrote the essay “Introduction: To Belong, or Not”
• Candas Jane Dorsey, whose Black Wine won the 1997 Award, wrote two poems: “Losing It” and “Morning in the Garden of Fear”
• Cameron Reed, whose “Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation” won the 1998 Award, wrote the novelette “The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For”
• John Kessel, whose “Stories for Men” won the 2002 award, wrote the novella “The Ghost”
• Geoff Ryman, 2005 winner for Air: Or, Have Not Have, wrote the novel Animals
• Catherynne M. Valente, 2006 winner for The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden, wrote the story “Came The Last Night of Sadness” and the novelette “When He Calls Your Name”
• Sarah Hall, 2007 winner for The Carhullan Army, wrote the novel Helm
• Nisi Shawl, whose Filter House won the 2008 Award, wrote the novel Making Amends
• Patrick Ness, whose The Knife of Never Letting Go won the 2008 Award, wrote the novel Chronicles of a Lizard Nobody
• K. Ibura, 2012 winner for Ancient, Ancient, wrote the novel Tempest
• Caitlin R. Kiernan, whose The Drowning Girl won the 2012 Award, released the short fiction collection Bright Dead Star
• Akwaeke Emezi, 2019 winner for Freshwater, wrote the novels Son of the Morning and Somadina
• H. Pueyo, 2017 Fellow, wrote the novella But Not Too Bold
• Vida Cruz-Borja, 2018 Fellow, wrote the novella Mirror Marked
• Ana Hurtado, 2018 Fellow, wrote the short stories “En el obscurito,” “Pezcara,” and “Anémona”
• Mars Lauderbaugh, 2024 Fellow, wrote the comic “Old Ones, New Ones”
• Eugen Bacon, 2024 Fellow, wrote the short stories “The Shadow Eater of Órino-Rin,” “AI Chronicles: Properties of a Human Curse,” “Ne’za’s Yearning,” and “Kinje’kitile and the Jintu,” co-wrote the poem “Momentum Vitae,” wrote the novellas The Nga’phandileh Whisperer and Novic, co-edited the anthology Fission #5, and wrote several essays and a review
• Ayida Shonibar, 2025 Fellow, wrote the poem “All Relative” and the short stories “Am I a Woman, Am I a Bird of Prey” and “An Unholy Terroir”

Happy reading and nominating!

And thanks to Brackett Robertson for researching this list.