Fellowship Information

How to Apply

Fellowship Winners

About the Fellowship

The Otherwise fellowships grew out of the Otherwise Motherboard’s desire to expand the reach of the Award to reflect the changing and expanding landscape both of science fiction/fantasy and of gender itself. We know that the most exciting, challenging narratives of speculation don’t always fit within the boundaries of genre fiction as we know them – such as Janelle Monae’s genre bending work, which appeared on the Honor List of the 2013 Otherwise Award.

We know that members of historically underrepresented communities are creating a lot of the most important work, with less recognition from the world at large than members of communities with higher visibility. And we know that emerging writers and creators are rarely paid for their labor, even when they produce and publish work that finds an audience. We want to support the development of new work, in any form or genre, that uses speculative narrative to expand or explore our understanding of gender, especially in its intersections with race, nationality, class, disability, sexuality, age, and other categories of identification and structures of power.

In 2015, we awarded the first Otherwise Fellowships. Fellowships are $500 per recipient and will continue to be awarded each year to two creators who are doing work that pushes forward the Otherwise mission. We hope to create a network of Fellows who will build connections, support one another, and find collaborators. We imagine that some of the works we support now might even win the Otherwise Award one day. We hope to change the field of speculative fiction by providing recognition for new voices that have been under-represented, but whose work is vital in making visible the many forces that are changing gender today and tomorrow.

The Otherwise 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.

Each Otherwise Fellow is invited to serve on the selection committee for the following year, and to write a short report about their work to be archived on the Otherwise website.

We want to acknowledge the work of our inaugural Otherwise Fellow who helped us work on developing this process. We chose micha cárdenas, who is, in her own words, “an artist, theorist, student and educator who creates and studies trans of color movement in digital media, where movement includes migration, performance and mobility.” Micha frequently uses science fiction narrative in her creative work, most recently in her online game Redshift and Portalmetal, which explores a trans woman of color’s experiences of interplanetary migration. She also writes scholarship about science fiction media, such as her essay Shifting Futures: Digital Trans of Color Praxis on the work of Janelle Monae. The descriptions you read above were crafted with her collaboration.