This is a guest post by Debbie Notkin. Debbie is, among other things, the chair of the James Tiptree Jr. Award motherboard. Wearing another hat, she blogs at Body Impolitic.

Here’s the back story:

The James Tiptree Jr. Award is an annual literary prize for science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender, created in 1990 by authors Pat Murphy and Karen Joy Fowler. The award seeks out work that is thought-provoking, imaginative, and perhaps even infuriating. The Tiptree Award is intended to reward authors who are bold enough to contemplate shifts and changes in gender roles, a fundamental aspect of any society.

The award is named for Alice Sheldon, who wrote her fiction primarily under the name “James Tiptree, Jr.” Sheldon helped identify the imaginary barrier between “women’s writing” and “men’s writing.” “His” fine stories were eagerly accepted by publishers and won many awards in the field. Many years later, after she had written some other work under the female pen name of Raccoona Sheldon, it was discovered that she was female. The discovery led to a great deal of discussion of what aspects of writing, if any, are essentially gendered. The name “Tiptree” was selected to illustrate the complex role of gender in writing and reading. Julie Phillips wrote a brilliant, award-winning biography of Sheldon/Tiptree, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice Sheldon.

Here’s the job posting:

Our website (a WordPress site) is graphically lovely, but it is in a sorry state in every other way. It needs some immediate band-aid fixes, some restructuring, a workable shopping cart, and also some basic back-end database work (in more or less that order). Once it’s in shape, we’ll need ongoing maintenance and small improvements. This is paid (non-profit scale) work and is open to people of any gender. We’re looking for someone who can start soon (perhaps by the beginning of July) and do the basic work relatively quickly, because we’ve spent way too long waiting for someone who kept putting this on the back burner. We don’t care where our web person is geographically, as long as they are responsive by email.

Would that be you? If you’re interested, please email me at kith@spicejar.org. I’d like to see a site or two that you’ve done, or a couple of references. I have an existing proposal to share with potential web folx, and am very open to other ways of approaching the problems.