The Travel Research Grant is awarded to assist a writer (speculative fiction, poetry, drama, creative nonfiction) in his or her research. The 2005 Travel Research Grant includes $600 to be used to cover airfare, lodging, and/or other travel expenses. The grant is awarded by a committee of SLF members on the basis of interest and merit. Our jurors for 2006 were: Tiffany Jonas, editor and publisher for Aio Publishing Co, LLC in the United States, and Colin Harvey, author of Lightning Days, in the United Kingdom.
Winner: Sharon Zink
Sharon will use the grant to research the history of female astronauts and undertake basic flight training in her research for a fabulist novel, involving travel to NASA Headquarters Library in Washington, DC, Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Sharon has published poetry and short fiction in publications such as the More Words in Edgewise poetry anthology, Rain in the Upper Floor Cafe poetry anthology, Carve, and Alt Future: New Writing from Brighton. Her short story Lobsters was translated into Spanish and published in the Mexican national paper El Independiente. She has been named the winner of Writers Inc. Writers of the Year in the short story category, awarded two Arts Council Free Reads by The South and The Literacy Consultancy, and shortlisted for the Raymond Carver International Short Story Award. Her short story Dust is forthcoming in The New Writer magazine.
The jurors will offer comments on Sharons' writing sample and grant applicaton during the week of October 16th; please check back for more on the recipient of this year's grant!
Mary Anne, I wonder if there is a convenient way for you to pass on a message to Sharon Zink? (She may well know all this already, but I thought I’d mention it just in case.)
I’m a librarian at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, and we hold the JSC History Collection Archives. I asked our Archivist what we have in terms of female astronauts. She said that the original women who went through astronaut testing in the 1950s were not NASA-funded and so are not part of our archives; they operated out of Lovelace Clinic in New Mexico. However, we do have some things on astronaut selection in general, including the female astronauts in the 1970s. One thing she mentioned in particular was an inquiry letter from Marsha Ivans about becoming an astronaut — and she has now flown 4 times!
Our archivist is Shelly Henley Kelly; she can be reached via the contact information on our webpage at http://www.uhcl.edu/library.
(As a side note, we also hold JSC’s current collection — they outsourced their main onsite library to us about four years ago. I’m the liaison between our library and our JSC patrons.)
I’ll pass the info along, Amy. Thanks!