2020 Awards Eligibility Post

This year has been a hell of a decade, right? I published three short stories this year, plus one non-fiction essay. On the off-chance that you feel inspired to nominate my work, or the stories in the anthology I edited, for whatever awards or lists you might be nominating for, here's the list of my 2020 accomplishments.

"The Dragon's Lake" published in Dragon Bike: Fantastical Stories of Bicycling, Feminism, and Dragons, February 2020

"…a fresh take on epic fantasy, complete with giant snails."

​"The Dragon's Lake" is about a novice adventurer who gets separated from her adventuring party and trapped by a dragon-centered cult policed by giant snails. There's no white knight to charge in and save this protagonist; she has to work together with another woman who's trapped to figure out a way to escape. (Hint: their plan includes a bicycle.)

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"Inviting Disaster" published in And Lately, The Sun, November 2020

A teen in tornado-ravaged Kansas, where houses can now retract underground to safety, falls in love with a new neighbor who constantly flirts with danger.

See a brief video of me reading an excerpt from this story at ​​https://latelythesun.com/2020/11/25/inviting-disaster-by-sarena-ulibarri/

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"All My Eggplants in One Basket" published in Sunshine Superhighway, December 2020

"All My Eggplants in One Basket" is about a rooftop gardener and the pterosaur who moves into her garden plot. It also features an island paradise that's not just for the rich, a sneaky protester, and a lot of Art Nouveau imagery.

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"What Do We Do When the World Doesn't End?" published in Strange Horizons, March 2020

A personal essay about solarpunk, my hippie parents, and how I coped with the COVID-19 pandemic by trying to learn how to garden.

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Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Winters, published by World Weaver Press, January 2020

I'm not actually eligible for any of the "Best Editor" awards, but all of the stories in this anthology are eligible in either the short story or novelette categories, and I would celebrate their nomination as much as my own.

This anthology envisions winters of the future, with stories of scientists working together to protect narwhals from an oil spill, to bring snow back to the mountains of Maine, to preserve ecosystems—even if they have to be under glass domes. They're stories of regular people rising to extraordinary circumstances to survive extreme winter weather, to fix a threat to their community's energy source, to save a living city from a deep-rooted sickness. Some stories take place after an environmental catastrophe, with luxury resorts and military bases and mafia strongholds transformed into sustainable communes; others rethink the way we could organize cities, using skybridges and seascrapers and constructed islands to adapt to the changes of the Anthropocene. Even when the nights are long, the future is bright in these seventeen diverse tales.

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