Hey, folks. The SLF is in serious need of volunteers to help us with our SF/F literature grants. Specifically, we’d like to add:
• two assistant grants administrators (to help Malon Edwards, our primary grants administrator)
• a broader pool of jurors for our various grants (older writers, working class, travel, diversity, and South Asian)
No particular background qualifications necessary; we’d like to draw from a broad pool of people who love speculative lit. and want to help make it even better.
GRANTS ADMINISTRATORS would help with tracking the grant work through the course of year, helping to keep jurors on track with their reading, making sure press releases are sent out in a timely fashion, making sure juror honoraria and grant award money gets sent out, etc. With five grants, it’s not a huge time commitment, but we need people who are good at keeping to a calendar. If you’re familiar with Trello, even better, as we’re transitioning to using that to help keep track of our tasks at the SLF, but if not, we can easily teach you. This pays a tiny $250 honorarium for the year, and a lovely lapel pin in thanks.
JURORS would let us know which grants they’d be interested in reading for, any relevant background they have (i.e., a LGBT person who’d like to read for the diversity grants), and then they’d be added to a spreadsheet of possible jurors. We’d then contact you (or rather, the grants administrators would), when putting together the jury for a particular grant, and see if you’re available to serve. Service would mean reading some applications, discussing your picks with the rest of the jury, and making your recommendations within a reasonable timeframe (usually over two months). This pays an even tinier $25 honorarium, if you serve on a jury, and some lovely SLF bookmarks in thanks.
Please note that grants administrators cannot apply for our grants within three years of volunteering for the SLF, and jurors cannot apply for our grants within one year of serving on one of our juries. (Just being in the spreadsheet as a possible juror is fine, though.)
If you’re interested in serving with us, please write to Karen Murphy, our managing director, at managing_dir@speculativeliterature.org, with the subject line: GRANT ADMINISTRATOR or GRANT JUROR. (If you’re interested in both, feel free to put both.) Please include a brief paragraph about yourself and your background in spec lit. (Avid reader, librarian or teacher, writer, etc.)
Thank you!