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Support the Tiptree Award!
There are many ways you can support the Tiptree Award.
You can read Tiptree Award-winning and shortlisted fiction. You
can recommend titles to Tiptree judges here.
You can attend Tiptree ceremonies and help us celbrate and serenade
the authors. Pat Murphy has 10 suggestions for how you can keep
books you love in print. You can also help us raise money to pay
for Tiptree winners’ prizes, travel and hotel expenses, as
well as make possible the anthologies in which the award publishes
short-listed fiction and essays. How can you do that? Bid on an
item at a Tiptree auction, buy a chocolate chip cookie at a Tiptree
bake sale, purchase a Tiptree Quilt poster or a Freddie Baer t-shirt.
But the BEST thing you could do would be to volunteer:
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Help Wanted
The Tiptree Award is entirely supported by volunteer labor. Everyone
from the motherboard members to the jurors to the treasurer to
the webmaster to the people who do the variety of small and large
tasks necessary to keep the award going is a volunteer.
Volunteers get three things: the eternal gratitude of the motherboard,
the pleasure of a job well done, and a spiffy Space Babe enamel
pin. The only way to get a pin is to volunteer.
Here's a list of jobs we need done now. |
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10 Ways to Keep Books You Love in Print
by Pat Murphy
There are books you love, books that change your
life, books that make you realize that you aren’t alone.
But sometimes, those books go out of print and are no longer available.
You gnash your teeth and curse the vagaries of publishing. You
feel helpless and frustrated, but you know that there’s nothing
you can do about it.
Not so! You can do something! Publishing is a capitalist
enterprise, driven by sales and profit (as well as a love of books).
But even if you’re too broke to buy a paperback book, you can
influence book sales and affect a publisher’s profits. Pat
Murphy lists 10 ways YOU can help keep the books you love in print
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Tiptree Auctions
Our big fund-raising event each year is the Tiptree Auction on
Saturday night at WisCon.
A little fund-raising, a lot of entertainment, some Extreme Auctioneering.
It’s Bread and Circuses, non-stop live action, and it’s
all for a good cause. Ellen Klages has become internationally notorious
for her auctions. Come and find out why. Anything might happen.
She has sold her own hair (all of it), a hand-knitted uterus, and
a kangaroo scrotum purse. She has organized the Dance of the Founding
Mothers, and been paid not to sing or do a wretched Scottish accent.
She sometimes takes off parts of her costume and sells them to
the highest bidder. You just never know.
Read more about the history of the Tiptree auction and check out
a list of items recently auctioned here.
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Tiptree Bakesale
In Pat Murphy’s speech announcing the Tiptree Award she
said:
I would like to announce the creation of the
James Tiptree, Jr., Memorial Award, to be presented annually
to a fictional work that explores and expands the roles of women
and men. We’re still in the planning stages, but we plan
to appoint a panel of five judges and we plan to finance the
award—and this is another stroke of genius on Karen [Joy
Fowler]’s part—through bake sales. (If you want to volunteer
to run a bake sale, talk to me after the speech.)
People DID come up to talk to Pat after the speech and the next
year, when the first Tiptree prizes were awarded to Eleanor Arnason
and Gwyneth Jones at WisCon, there was a bakesale. And there has
been a bakesale at WisCon every year since, and at every convention
that hosts a Tiptree Award ceremony, and at lots of other conventions
too. People seem to like them. People seem to like chocolate. So
many people wanted to do Tiptree bakesales, that the coordinators
of the first bakesales (Hope Kiefer and Karen Babich) wrote a brochure
on how to run one. Want to know how to run a bakesale? Go here.
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Tiptree Quilt
The Tiptree Quilt is based on James Tiptree, Jr.’s science
fiction novel, Brightness Falls from the Air, which tells
the story of humans and aliens who witness the spectacular passing
of a fiery wave-front, and the incineration of the planet Damien,
caused by the nova of The Murdered Star. 1,248 squares of fabric
were used to construct this 100" x 121" textile painting of
this fantastic scene. Except for two small pieces, the swirling
image is constructed with only straight-cut pieces. If you look
closely
you can see female signs in the planet below. Work spanned
ten years and the combined effort of 65 people from around the
world, many of whom had never quilted before. Elspeth Krisor directed
and coordinated work on the quilt; Jeanne Gomoll and Tracy Benton
designed it. For more information go here.
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Tiptree T-Shirts
Freddie Baer has created and donated a Tiptree T-shirt design
each year of the Tiptree Award’s life. A limited number are
silkscreened and made available at the site of the Tiptree Ceremony;
they sell out very quickly, though sometimes Tiptree shirts do
show up at auctions, where they inspire wild bidding. For information
about the artist and t-shirt art from past years go here.
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