Astraea proudly introduces the winners of the Eleventh Annual Lesbian Writers Fund Awards: Lu Vickers, Fiction, $10,000 Vickers received her PhD. in English from Florida State University where she was a Kingsbury Fellow. She has twice been awarded Florida’s Individual Artists Grants for fiction, and her short stories and essays have been published in many journals, including the Apalachee Review and Salon. Parts of her first novel, Breathing Underwater, have been anthologized in Every Woman I’ve Ever Loved (Cleis Press) and Women on Women 3 (Plume Books). Vickers teaches at Tallahassee Community College and lives with her partner of eleven years and their three sons. Samiya Bashir, Poetry, $10,000 Bashir, of Brooklyn, New York, serves on the Editorial Board of Curve Magazine and NiaOnline.com. Currently, she is editing Best Black Women’s Erotica 2 (Cleis Press, scheduled for release in January Her debut collection of poetry, Blood and Wine, is to be released by Third World Press. The University of California’s Poet Laureate, her poetry, articles and essays have been published in an array of venues including Contemporary American Women Poets (Greenwood Press, The American Journal of Public Health, and Kuumba: Journal of Black Lesbian and Gay Literature and Art #4. Kirsten Dinnall Hoyte, Fiction, Claire of the Moon Award, $1,500 Dinnall Hoyte lives in Concord, Massachussetts, and is a doctoral student in Sociology and Social Policy at Harvard University. Her work has been published in Sojourner, The Harvard Review and many other publica- tions. Debra Busman, Fiction, Loving Lesbians Award, $1,500 Busman is the Coordinator of Service Learning for the Institute of Human Communication at California State University, Monterey Bay, where she teaches Creative Writing and Social Action, Literature, and Composition. She lives in Salinas, California. Jenna Capeci, Poetry, Loving Lesbians Award, Born and reared in Brooklyn, Capeci received her B.A. in Biology and Women’s Studies from the College of William and Mary. She recently returned to New York after almost four years in Thailand where she worked with ethnic Burmese activists on issues of nonviolence and environmental protection. Meg Jochild, Poetry, Loving Lesbians Award, $1,500 Jochild is from Austin, Texas, and writes and performs for Actual Lives, an “in-your-face” disabled theater troupe led by Terry Galloway. She has a daughter and grandchild and has been an active crusader in liberation struggles for the past two decades.
