Walidah Imarisha. Photo by Pete Shaw.

Elizabeth LaPensée

The 2015 Tiptree Fellowship winners have been selected, Walidah Imarisha and Elizabeth LaPensée.

The Tiptree Fellowship program, created earlier this year by the James Tiptree Jr. Literary Award Council, 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.

Elizabeth LaPensée expresses herself through writing, design, and art in games, comics, and animation.

With the support of her Tiptree Fellowship, LaPensée plans to create an addition to Spacecanoe, her interactive web-friendly non-linear episodic animation. In this alternate reality,  people choose what varying expressions of gender they are happiest with and any arrangement of partnership that makes them happiest from moment to moment. This world reflects the views of certain Indigenous cultures present and active today. The animation does not include dialogue, but rather is an abstract and artful expression of this way of living and knowing.

Walidah Imarisha is an educator, editor, writer, organizer and spoken word artist, involved in “several projects that work with the concept of visionary science fiction.”

One project is a new collection of poetry called Tubman’s Uncertainty Principle. These poems explore Black women’s freedom struggles historically, currently, and futuristically through a poetic framework of quantum physics. Imarisha is also  is writing a novel that expands on her short story “Black Angel,” originally published in the anthology Octavia’s Brood.

The fellowship selection committee was composed of Tiptree Motherboard members Alexis Lothian and Debbie Notkin, Tiptree Award winner Nisi Shawl, and inaugural Tiptree Fellow micha cárdenas.