James Tiptree, Jr. Award Winner Announced

On Friday, March 22, the winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award was announced for 2018: Gabriela Damián Miravete, for her short story “They Will Dream in the Garden”, translated by Adrian Demopulos and published online by Latin American Literature Today (May 2018).

The story is set in a future Mexico, where femicide is a reality and the memory of murdered women are preserved in interactive holograms “living” in a garden maintained by survivors. A unique aspect of the story is that it’s told in future tense. Adrian Demopulos also received special recognition for the translation.

Judges for the Tiptree Award also selected works for the Tiptree Award Honor List:

• Capricious Magazine: The Gender Diverse Pronouns Issue, A.C. Buchanan, Ed. (January 2018)
• Sodom Road Exit, Amber Dawn (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018)
• Chercher La Femme, L. Timmel Duchamp (Aqueduct Press, 2018)
• “Big Girl”, Meg Elison (Fantasy and Science Fiction, Nov/Dec 2017)
• Power & Magic: The Queer Witch Comics Anthology, Joamette Gil, Ed. (P & M Press, 2017)
• GlitterShip Year Two, Keffy R. M. Kehrli, Ed. (CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2018)
• The Tiger Flu, Larissa Lai (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2019)
• Dirty Computer, Janelle Monáe (visual album – Wondaland/Bad Boy/Atlantic, 2018)
• “Sandals Full of Rainwater”, A.E. Prevost (Capricious Magazine: The Gender Diverse Pronouns Issue, January 2018)
• Maresi: The Red Abbey Chronicles, Maria Turtschaninoff, translation by A.A. Prime (Amulet Books, 2017)
• “Me, Waiting for Me, Hoping for Something More”, Dee Warrick (Shimmer Magazine #41, January 2018)

The Tiptree Award winner, Miravete, will be honored at WisCon over the Memorial Day weekend. The award comes with a $1,000 prize, a specially commissioned piece of art, and chocolate.

The award is named after the pseudonym used by Alice B. Sheldon, who used the name as a way of getting past the barriers women writers faced in publishing. Sheldon also wrote under the pen name “Raccoona Sheldon”. Sheldon was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2012, and it wasn’t until 1977 that anyone knew “James Tiptree, Jr.” was a woman. Her first published story was “Birth of a Salesman” in Analog Science Fact & Fiction (March 1968). As “Tiptree”, Sheldon won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Jupiter, and World Fantasy Award.