Otherwise Fellowship award 2020 ($500 cash prize)

The otherwise fellowship award, formally known as James Tiptree award is an award with the aim of encouraging the exploration and expansion of gender. Artists who can weave their work around gender, feed us a new perspective of gender are encouraged to submit.

Who is eligible for the otherwise fellowship?

• Writers, artists, scholars, media makers, remix artists, performers, musicians
• Applicant can be from anywhere in the world
• No age restrictions
• No entry fee
• Applicants work should be centered on a fresh perspective of gender through speculative fiction (In a form we recognize as science fiction or fantasy genre or maybe in some other way)

Deadline for applying for the Otherwise Fellowship

October 31, 2020

What to submit for the Otherwise Fellowship

• Two statements of 1-2 pages each which will be explained below
• A brief example of your work of no more than 1,500 words.
• These three things should be submitted via email to fellowships@otherwiseaward.org

(Please save your statements as a single document in word, .rft, .pdf format)

Statement 1 should answer the question

• How are you working with speculative narrative to expand or explore our understanding of gender?

What we want to understand here:

Tell us why your work is groundbreaking in the ways that the Otherwise award honors; what’s speculative about it? How you engage the complexities, intersections and possibilities of gender in real and imagined worlds. Use this statement and tell us why we should be excited about accepting your work.

We are open to a broad understanding of “gender” and are especially interested in its connection with race, nationality, class, disability, sexuality and other categories of identification and structure of power.

Statement 2 should answer this question

• What will you use the fellowship for?

What we want to understand here:

We want to know why the monetary grant will be important for the particular project you plan to use for. Maybe it will go into materials or travel/research purposes, or maybe for the cost of presenting your work at a conference or an exhibition or it might buy you time away from work. We realize $500 is a drop in an ocean for projects like films, maybe you want to use it as seed money, to help build up a larger sum.

This is where you tell us more about who you are – how this projects fits into your overall trajectory, what challenges it may help you overcome, and what it mean to you to be named an otherwise fellow.

The third requirement is an example of your work

This can be in form of a link to something online, a published copy or an unpublished story or piece of writing. It can be a set of images that tells a story, a video, or something else.

If you are applying for this fellowship to work on a larger project, you may wish to send in pieces you have already completed.

It should be no more than 1,500 words of writing, five minutes of video or an equivalent length in any other media.

What is required of otherwise fellowship recipient?

• To write a short report telling the otherwise community about your work

(Read past report here)

• To participate in the selection process for choosing next years fellows.

To better understand speculative fiction, you can click here.

Good luck!