Grants

The Lesbian Writers Fund provides grants to emerging lesbian poets and fiction writers across the U.S. Grants are determined by a panel of judges. This year, the Fund awarded a total of $26,600 to 12 women whose work shows extraordinary promise in the arenas of fiction and poetry. A portion of these awards was made possible by Skip's Sappho Fund at Astraea. Each year, awards are made from the Lesbian Writers Fund and the Lesbian Visual Arts Fund to artists located west of the Mississippi in posthumous honor of Skip Neal, a lesbian artist and Astraea supporter.

Lu Vickers /  Fiction /  $10,000
Vickers received her Ph.D. in English from Florida State University, where she was a Kingsbury Fellow.  She has twice been awarded Florida's Individual Artist Grants for fiction, and her short stories and essays have been published in many journals, including the Apalachee Review and Salon.  Parts of her first novel, Breathing Underwater, have been anthologized in Every Woman I've Ever Loved (Cleis Press) and Women on Women 3 (Plume Books).  Vickers teaches at Tallahassee Community College and lives with her partner of eleven years and their three sons.

Breathing Underwater
By Lu Vickers

Mama didn't move. I struggled to keep afloat, beat the water with my hands. She was going to let me drown and was weighing her gains against her losses. Watching me, eyes flat as pennies. I was Not the Right Kind of Girl. Never had been. Panicked, I went under again, holding my breath, my chest about to burst. I sank even though I kicked hard against the water.

Then there was an explosion, a blur of bubbles. Mama jumped into the canal next to me and sank beneath the surface, facing me, her eyes wide open. Her skin was waxy-looking underwater, like the worm on Maisey's hook. She held her hands out to me, scissored her legs. Her red hair floated above her head like silky grass. Silver bubbles leaked out of her mouth and nose. She clutched my hands and we sank deeper, where there was no sound. The water grew dark green in my mouth, the color of trees when night is falling. Her face was a question mark. That was the last I saw of her before everything went black. I floated backward through space, twitching like Maisey's worm, sinking, a voice whirling through my head, wish I'd never had you.

Samiya Bashir /  Poetry /  $10,000
Samiya Bashir (New York, NY) is editor of Best Black Women's Erotica 2 (Cleis Press) and co-editor of Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art (Third World Press). She has served as editor for numerous publications including Ms., Black Issues Book Review, Curve and NiaOnline.com. A University of California Poet Laureate and Cave Canem Fellow, Bashir's poetry, articles and essays have been published in an array of venues including Contemporary American Women Poets (Greenwood Press), Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam (Three Rivers Press), The American Journal of Public Health, and Kuumba: Journal of Black Lesbian & Gay Literature & Art #4.

One Small Step
By Samiya Bashir

She dons rubber gloves and
cotton mitts, surgeonic sweat
coats her brow, dots her lips.

We stole the pink plastic cup
from the kiddie korner at
the clinic, hand made
the tube from an enema
bottle, bought at a
99-cent store.

Sometimes we like it fresh,
sometimes frozen.

Her brother, only 19, has
much to give, needs
no great notice.

She reminds me
she's loved me for almost
a decade, will love me for
centuries more - I always
get nervous at this moment.

I want to moan, raise my hips
to meet her hand, reach into
the forest of her hair,
whisper things.

I want to run to the back
of the wardrobe we share,
cower behind denims and silks.

She reaches up for a kiss,
returns her focus to our task.

We complete the operation,
and wait.

Fiction, Claire of the Moon Award
Kirsten Dinnall Hoyte
$1,500
Dinnall Hoyte lives in Concord, Massachussetts, and is a doctoral student in Sociology and Social Policy at Harvard University.  Her work has been published in Sojourner, The Harvard Review and many other publications.

Fiction, Loving Lesbians Award
Debra Busman
$1,500
Busman is the Coordinator of Service Learning for the Institute of Human Communication at California State University, Monterey Bay, where she teaches Creative Writing and Social Action, Literature, and Composition.  She lives in Salinas, California.

Loving Lesbians Award, Poetry
Jenna Capeci
$1,500
Born and reared in Brooklyn, Capeci received her B.A. in Biology and Women's Studies from the College of William and Mary.  She recently returned to New York after almost four years in Thailand where she worked with ethnic Burmese activists on issues of nonviolence and environmental protection.

Loving Lesbians Award, Poetry
Meg Jochild
$1,500
Jochild is from Austin, Texas, and writes and performs for Actual Lives, an "in-your-face" disabled theater troupe led by Terry Galloway.  She has a daughter and grandchild and has been an active crusader in liberation struggles for the past two decades.

Honorable Mention Fiction /  $100
Felicia Luna Lemus
Leslie Anne Leasure
Kathy Anderson

Honorable Mention Poetry /  $100
Myra Mniewski
Liz Freidinm
Yvonne Etaghene

Judges of this year's awards included:

Fiction Judges:

Emma Perez, El Paso, Texas, is a historian, creative writer and feminist critic.  Her publications include:  Gulf Dreams and The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History. Currently, Perez is Chair and Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas, El Paso.  She is writing a historical novel, Forgetting the Alamo: Or, Blood Memory.  

Susan Stinson, Northampton, Massachussetts, is the author of two novels, Fat Girl Dances with Rocks and Martha Moody, as well as Belly Songs, poetry and short essays. She has received grants and awards from the Vogelstein and Wurlitzer Foundations, among others.  Her work has been translated into German and Italian and featured in Seneca Review, Curve, Sojourner, Women's Review of Books and Diva.  She recently completed Venus of Chalk, a novel about an awakening muse.

Poetry Judges:

Eileen Myles, New York, New York, is a frequent contributor to The Nation, Nest, Bookforum, Art in America, The Village Voice, and Seattle's Stranger. Her other published works include Chelsea Girls, Cool for You, School of Fish, Maxfield Parrish, and Not Me.  She co-edited The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Reading, which received a Lambda Book Award. In 1992 she conducted an openly female write-in campaign for herself as President of the United States.

Robin G. White, Kennesaw, Georgia, is the author of Resurrection: A Collection of Work, a 2002 Georgia Author of the Year Award finalist selection. She is the 2000 winner of the Chicago Literary Exchange Lisa C. Moore Award. She co-owns Kings Crossing Publishing, a company dedicated to promoting and publishing writers whose voices are overlooked by major markets.