The Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative
What are the social responsibilities of arts and culture? What kinds of relationships can art have with science? How can stories and media influence political discourse and collective decision making? What do we do when the past can no longer serve as a reliable guide to the future?
In partnership with ASU's Center for Science and the Imagination, the Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative explores how our imagination--or lack thereof--shapes humanity’s responses to climate change and can work with science to pose potential solutions.
Everything Change Climate Fiction Contest
In addition to speaker events and other educational programs, the Climate Futures Initiative sponsors Everything Change, a bi-annual climate fiction contest exploring the future of our changing planet using the tools of speculative fiction.
Having received more than 580 submissions from over 77 different countries, we're proud to announce that this year's winner is Amanda Baldeneaux!
This year's contest was judged by by Claire Vaye Watkins, author of Gold Fame Citrus. Other finalists include Barakat Akin, Kathryn Bucolo Hill, J.R. Burgmann, Mason Carr, Scott Dorsch, Sigrid Marianne Gayangos, Jules Hogan, Anya Ow, and Natasha Seymore.
To learn more about the contest, keep reading or visit the Imagination and Climate Future's website at http://climateimagination.asu.edu. You can also read past anthologies.
The Provocation
The beating drum of the climate crisis is a constant reminder that our planet is a closed, limited system, and that we’re currently living far beyond its boundaries. We are looking for short stories that help us imagine how humans can live within Earth’s planetary boundaries—at the individual level, yes, but more importantly at the level of organizations, communities, and societies, and at the level of a global human civilization. What would our world look like if we actually respected and lived within planetary boundaries? How would we organize our homes, communities, cities, and nations? How would we live with and relate to each other at the global level? How might politics, culture, relationships, and identities—all of the messiness of human lives—change in a world where we’re grappling seriously with the climate crisis, and perhaps even trying to restore some of the damage we’ve already done to the planet and its ecosystems? What kinds of obstacles, conflicts, and transformations will arise during these humongous shifts? How can we ensure that a sustainable or even climate-positive future is also a just and equitable one?
Guidelines and Details
Submissions must be 5,000 words or less. All genres of short fiction are welcome. The first place winner will be awarded $1,000, and nine finalists will receive prizes of $100. There is no entry fee to submit your story. The winner and finalists will be published in our third Everything Change digital anthology, which will be free to read and share.
The submission deadline is April 15, 2020, by 11:59pm Mountain Standard Time (GMT-7).
Judging
The contest’s lead judge will be Claire Vaye Watkins, a former Guggenheim Fellow, winner of The Story Prize and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and author of Gold Fame Citrus, a climate fiction novel that was named a best book of 2015 by The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and NPR.
Claire will join an interdisciplinary group of judges with expertise in climate science, sustainability, creative writing, and environmental literature. Our judging process will be blind: judges will not have access to any identifying information about the authors, including their names, places of origin, or ages.
Meet our Judge
Claire Vaye Watkins was born and raised in the Mojave Desert. She is the author of Gold Fame Citrus and Battleborn, which won the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. She is an assistant professor in the Helen Zell Writers' Program at the University of Michigan and the co-director, with Derek Palacio, of the Mojave School, a free creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada.
More Information
To learn more about the contest, you can read the first two Everything Change anthologies for free in a variety of digital formats:
In each of our first two climate fiction contests, we received a broad array of high-quality submissions: hundreds of short stories from authors in more than 65 countries. Everything Change, Volume II was reviewed by a variety of media outlets, including NPR and The Chicago Review of Books.
If you have questions, send us an email.
Our Sponsor
Support for the 2020 Everything Change Climate Fiction Contest is provided by Ingka Group, the largest retailer and a strategic partner in the IKEA franchise system, operating nearly 380 IKEA stores in 30 countries. Learn more about Ingka Group and its commitment to sustainability at https://www.ingka.com/about-us/sustainability. Ingka Group and its representatives will not be involved in the judging process, the decision-making around the winners of the contest, or the editorial process for the Everything Change book.