We are pleased to announce the selection of two Tiptree Fellows: Mia Sereno and Porpentine Charity Heartscape.

Sereno is a visual artist and poet who uses her art to explore the weight of her heritage as a queer Filipino which in her words means being “heir to a history of struggle and revolution, colonization and war; descendant of women who spoke and fought, built and taught, and were as unflinching in their pursuit of their goals as they were whole hearted in love.” She describes her work as arising at “the point where women and monsters wear the same face,” where she can celebrate “the act of throwing off conceptions of women and femininity that were imposed on us by colonizers.” The support of the Tiptree Fellowship will help Sereno bring her project, a series of illustrations tentatively named The Magnificent Ones, to fruition. The series reimagines Filipina woman as near-mythological figures of fantastic grandeur.

Porpentine makes stories and games that draw on the powerful world building potential of science fiction and fantasy to experiment with gender, femininity, and/or non-normative mental states in new ways. She describes her work as being “about the visceral body, a body that sweats and dissociates and aches and desires and above all fights for itself until the day it dies.” In addition to making her own work, much of which is available for free online, she has popularized accessible tools for working with electronic literature, running workshops and helping people online. She will use the fellowship to pay for rent and healthcare to ensure that she can focus on her current projects – feminine-centered work that innovates both technology and socially, often in collaboration with other disenfranchised women.

The Fellowship Committee also decided to award honorable mentions to writers Emily Coon, Marianne Kirby, and K. Tempest Bradford.  We will let you know more about their work later this month.

The Tiptree Fellowship program, created in 2015, 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.

We intend to continue to provide Fellowships in future years. 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 Tiptree Award is intended to reward those writers who are bold enough to contemplate shifts and changes in gender roles, a fundamental aspect of any society.

The selection committee for this year’s Tiptree Fellowships was made up of the 2015 Tiptree Fellows, Elizabeth LaPensée and Walidah Imarisha; Tiptree Award winner Nike Sulway; and Tiptree Motherboard member Alexis Lothian.

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.

After the two Founding Mothers, perhaps no one has been more important to the success and identity of the Tiptree Award than Ellen Klages, whose legendary auctions gave the Award much of its visibility, character, and flair (not to mention raising enough money to keep us going as a stable organization for over 20 years).

Ellen retired from her auctioneer role in 2015. Now she is taking an open-ended leave of absence from the Tiptree Motherboard.

If you only know Ellen as our take-no-prisoners fundraiser, you’re missing out on some great writing, including her award-winning story “Basement Magic” and her wonderful middle-grade historical novel, The Green Glass Sea. We can’t be too sad about losing Ellen from the Motherboard, since her plan is to concentrate on her own career. That includes a new novella, Passing Strange (tor.com, January 2017), a collection of her recent short fiction, Wicked Wonders (Tachyon, May 2017), and a novel-in-progress. We can’t wait.

Ellen says:

The Tiptree Award changed my life, and brought me friends and a community that I will cherish forever. Don’t think of this as goodbye; I’m not moving on, just shifting a little sideways to focus on my own work. I will continue to offer advice and opinions to the Motherboard, if called upon; to add Tiptree winners to my teetering to-read pile; and even manage to make a few magic objects for the auction!

Ellen, we’ll miss you, but we’re glad you’ll still be around!

Space Babe is thrilled to announce that you can now show your support for the Tiptree Award in the latest of fashion style. Or with your morning coffee! Space Babe t-shirts, hoodies and coffee mugs available through Teespring. Get your SpaceBabe style on!

Everything is available in light color (pictured above) and black. Shirts are $23-$26, hoodies $38-$46, mugs $15.All proceeds go to the Tiptree Award.

Look great, feel great!

Find and send us photos (good quality resolution preferred) taken at any of these Tiptree Award ceremonies, or of these missing items, and Space Babe will send you a personal thank you card via email or snailmail, your choice.

We are looking for photos from Tiptree Award ceremonies that did not take place at WisCon, specifically these conventions:

Readercon 7, Worcester, MA, 1994: Photos of the Tiptree ceremony, especially of winner, Nicola Griffith. We already have excellent images of the art award, but we would love to have photos of the Tiptree auction — since it was the historic, first auction featuring Ellen Klages as auctioneer. We’d also want a photo of Nicola being serenaded by the Tiptree Chorus.

• Potlatch 4, Oakland, CA, 1995: Photos of the Tiptree ceremony, especially of winner, Nancy Springer and the art award she received — a feathered mask created by Michaela Roessner.
• Readercon 10, Westborough, MA, 1998: Photos of the Tiptree ceremony, especially of winners, Candas Jane Dorsey and Kelly Link and the art awards they received — a painted silk scarf with images from Black Wine (Candas), and a snowglobe (Kelly). Both art awards were created by Ellen Klages. We’d also love a photo of the winners being serenaded by the Tiptree chorus.
• International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA) 20, Ft. Lauderdale FL, 1999. Photos of the Tiptree ceremony, especially of winner, Raphael Carter and the art award Raphael received — an intersex doll created by Melissa M. O’Grady. We have no record as to whether Raphael was serenaded by the Tiptree Chorus, but if that did happen, we would love to have some visual evidence.
• Readercon 14, Boston, MA, 2001. Photos of the Tiptree ceremony, especially of winner, Hiromi Goto, including any of Hiromi being serenaded by the Tiptree chorus. (We already have excellent images of the art award.)
• Gaylaxicon, Boston, MA. Photos of the Tiptree ceremony, especially of winners, Johanna Sinisalo and Joe Haldeman, including any of the winners being serenaded by the Tiptree chorus. (We already have excellent images of the art awards.)

Thank you!

Sheri S. Tepper died over this past weekend,  She was an incredibly prolific SF author, with more than 25 novels to her credit. She also wrote as E. E. Horlak, B. J. Oliphant, and A. J. Orde.

Her books appeared on the Tiptree Award Honor List twice:

• 2007 for The Margarets
• 2001 for The Fresco

and on the Long list four times:

• 1999 for Singer from the Sea
• 1998 for Six Moon Dance
• 1994 for Shadow’s End
• 1993 for A Plague of Angels 

She was also a guest of honor at WisCon 22, where she delivered a fiery, radical speech on the subject of birth control, women’s health and population, drawing upon her 1970s activism and work with Planned Parenthood. She will be remembered for the feminist and ecological themes of her work.

We have excellent applications for this year’s Tiptree Fellowships — but we still have time for a few more.

The Tiptree Fellows can be writers, artists, scholars, media makers, remix artists, performers, musicians, or something else entirely. If you are doing work that is changing the way we think about gender through speculative narrative – maybe in a form we would recognize as the science fiction or fantasy genre, maybe in some other way – you will be eligible for a Fellowship. You won’t have to be a professional or have an institutional affiliation, as we hope to support emerging creators who don’t already have institutional support for their work.

Fellowship winners receive $500 grants. If you were wishing you had time to apply but missed yesterday’s cut-off, now is your chance. Applications will be open until September 15, 2016.

It’s Alice Sheldon’s 101st birthday! We don’t have a special birthday cake for her, so we’re re-giving Georgie Schnobrich’s beautiful cake celebrating this year’s Tiptree Award winners.

As a birthday present, all three of WisCon 40’s guests of honor are posting their superb guest of honor speeches today. Justine Larbalestier’s moving speech was largely about the rights of young people, and especially young people of color. Sofia Samatar spoke eloquently about writing and flight. And Nalo Hopkinson announced the Lemonade Award, a kindness award for people who foster positive change in the science fiction community

These three speeches made for an amazing evening, capped by the Tiptree Award ceremony. If you were there, reading the speeches will bring it back for you. If you couldn’t be there, reading the speeches will give you something of the flavor. Also, Tiptree Award winner Eugene Fischer has posted an excellent summary of the speeches, with long quotations.

And, of course, we believe that Ally/Tip would be delighted if you felt like marking her birthday by donating to the award that preserves her legacy of exploring and expanding gender in speculative fiction.