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.

Mi Ok Song Bruining / LWF Award in Poetry / $10,000
Mi Ok Song Bruining lives and works in Cambridge, MA.where she practices social work. She's had several poems and essays published in journals and anthologies, and has conducted over 80 speaking engagements on the issues of international adoptions. Born in South Korea, Mi Ok was adopted into a white family at age five and after 36 years of estrangement, found her birth family. She will use this award to obtain a freelance editor to assist her in publishing three writing projects: a poetry manuscript, a children's book and her memoir.

Read Traps in Water by Mi Ok Song Bruining

Kirsten Dinnall Hoyte / LWF Award in Fiction / $10,000
Kirsten Dinnall Hoyte's fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in The Harvard Review, The Minnesota Review, Room of One's Own, Sojourner and The Hoot and Holler of the Owls: An Anthology of New Black Writers. She won Astraea's Claire of the Moon Award in 2002 and received an honorable mention in fiction in 2000. Kirsten earned a BS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an MFA from the University of Iowa. Currently a doctoral candidate at Harvard University, she lives and works in Concord, Massachusetts. Black Marks, to be published by Akashic Books in 2006, will be her first novel.

Read excerpt from the prologue of Black Marks by Kirsten Dinnall Hoyte

Judges for this year included:

Poetry

Alicia Gaspar de Alba is the author of various works of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, among them a collection of poems and essays, La Llorona on the Longfellow Bridge: Poetry y Otras Movidas (Arte Público Press, 2003), a historical novel Sor Juana's Second Dream (University of New Mexico Press, 1999), and most recently Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders (Arte Público Press, 2005). She is also the editor of Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture and Chicana/o Sexualities (Palgrave / Macmillan, 2003). An Associate Professor of Chicana/o Studies and English at the University of California-Los Angeles, Gaspar de Alba is a native of the El Paso/Juárez border. She has been researching the crimes since 1998 and organized an international conference on the murders at UCLA in 2003.

Fiction

EJ Graff has published two nonfiction books, including What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution. Recently Graff collaborated on Evelyn Murphy's Getting Even: Why Women Still Don't Get Paid Like Men—And What To Do About It. She has written for such publications as The New York Times Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, The Nation, The New Republic, and The Village Voice. She is currently a Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center resident scholar, and is a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, a contributing writer for Out magazine, and cofounder/senior advisor with the Center for New Words' WAM! (Women, Action, & Media) Conference. Graff won the Astraea Lesbian Writers Award in fiction in 1993.

Mariana Romo-Carmona is the author of Living at Night, a novel, Speaking Like an Immigrant, a collection of short stories, and the co-editor of Cuentos: Stories by Latinas. Her book in Spanish, Conversaciones, won the 2002 Lambda Book Award. Born in Chile, she now lives in New York, where she teaches at the CUNY Workers Extension Center, as well as in the Goddard College MFA Program in Writing.