Apply for 2019 Tiptree Fellowships by October 31

For the fifth year, the Tiptree Award is welcoming applications for Tiptree Fellowships: $500 grants for “emerging creators who are changing the way we think about gender through speculative narrative.”

If you think that description could apply to you — even if you are not working in a format most people would recognize as part of the science fiction or fantasy genre — you are eligible to apply for a Fellowship. Tiptree Fellows can be writers, artists, scholars, media makers, remix artists, performers, musicians, or something else entirely. So far our Fellows have been creators of visual art, poetry, fiction, and games.

The Tiptree Fellowship 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. The Fellowship Committee particularly encourages applications from members of communities that have been historically underrepresented in the science fiction and fantasy genre and from creators who are creating speculative narratives in media other than traditional fiction. In keeping with the focus of the Tiptree Award, the selection committee is seeking projects that explore and expand understandings of gender, particularly in relationship to race, nationality, class, disability, sexuality, age, and other factors that set individuals or groups apart as “other.” Fellowship applicants do not need a professional or institutional affiliation, as the intention of the Fellowship program is to support emerging creators who lack institutional support for their work.

The deadline to apply is October 31. The complete guidelines are available on the Tiptree Award site: “How to Apply”.

Applicants are asked to write an answer to the question: “How are you working with speculative narrative to expand or explore our understanding of gender?”

We are open to broad understandings of “gender” and are especially interested in its intersections with race, nationality, class, disability, sexuality, and other categories of identification and structures of power.

Here we want you to tell us why your work is groundbreaking in the ways that the Tiptree Award honors: what’s speculative about it, and how you engage the complexities, intersections, and possibilities of gender in real and imagined worlds. Use this statement to tell us why we should be excited about supporting your work.

And they are asked what they will use the fellowship for.

Here we want to know why the monetary grant will be important for the particular project you plan to use it to help realize. Maybe it will go toward materials, travel for research, or the cost of presenting your work at a conference or exhibition. Maybe it will buy you time away from a job or other responsibilities so that you have time to focus on your creative work. We realize that $500 is a drop in the ocean for some kinds of projects, like films; maybe you will be using your fellowship as seed money, to help build up a larger sum you need to raise.

This is also where you can tell us more about who you are – how this project fits into your overall trajectory, what challenges it might help you overcome, and what it would mean to you to be named a Tiptree Fellow.

To apply, you will need to write short responses to the two questions and to share a sample of your work – the complete guidelines are at this link.

To read about the work of previous Tiptree Fellows, click on their names below:

[Thanks to Pat Murphy for the story.]