Current Alice B Medal Winners - The Alice B Awards

Alice B Awards

Biographical Information
2025 Alice B Medal Winners

New 2025 Winners!

Sandra Butler (2025 Medal Winner) was raised in a conventional 1940s suburb to become a wife and a mother. After seven years of being unsuccessful at being a proper wife while continuing to be delighted with mothering, a divorce catapulted her and her two young daughters into the turbulent l960s when so much of American life was being challenged, re-defined, and remade. Immersed in the anti-war and civil rights movements, she found her political and psychological foundation in the second wave of the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s. She began college in her mid-thirties, which led to graduate study, five books, two films, and decades of organizing and community building. Her first book, Conspiracy of Silence: The Trauma of Incest, was published by Volcano Press in 1978. The second, Cancer in Two Voices, coauthored with her partner Barbara Rosenblum and published by Spinsters, Inc. in 1991, was the winner of the Lambda Lesbian Literary Award. Her third, It Never Ends: Mothering Middle-Aged Daughters, was co-authored with Nan Fink Gefen. Her fourth, The Kitchen is Closed: And Other Benefits of Being Old, is a collection of personal essays about life in the slow lane. Butler writes, channeling her inner Erma Bombeck, about the limitations aging imposes and the freedoms it allows. Leaving Home at 83 chronicles Butler’s struggles to balance her insistence on autonomy and independence with a growing longing to be taken care of, something she disapproves of in herself and has fought against all her life. Butler served on the founding editorial board of Persimmon Tree: An Online Magazine of the Arts by Women Over Sixty, creating a much needed resource for older women writers. Find out more about Sandra and her work at her website.

Sandra de Helen (2025 Medal Winner) has had her dramas and comedies performed all over the United States as well as Internationally. Audiences in NYC, Chicago, Ireland, London, San Diego, Los Angels, Canada, and the Philippines have been entertained and challenged by Sandra’s provocative writing. Recently, her work was staged in Portland, Oregon, as part of the Fertile Ground for New Works Festival. Her writings are archived in the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Collection at Ohio State University. Her oral history is archived at the Oregon Historical Society. Sandra studied with Maria Irene Fornes, Matt Zrebski, and Sage Cohen. With Kate Kasten, she co-founded Actors’ Sorority in Kansas City, Missouri. Later Sandra founded the Portland Women’s Theatre Company as well as Penplay. Today, she is a lifetime member of Dramatists Guild, International Centre for Women Playwrights, and Honor Roll! de Helen’s essays and poetry appear in Artemis Journal, Dramatist, ROAR, The Medical Journal of Australia, The Dandelion Review, Lavender Review: Night Issue, Sweatpants & Coffee, Mom Egg, and other journals. Her full-length poetry collections (Desire Returns for a Visit, 2018, Lesbian Humor is Not an Oxymoron, 2019, Poetry for the People, 2020, The World’s a Stage, 2021, I Eat My Words: A Poetry Cookbook, and Migraines and Their Remedies, 2023) are published by Launch Point Press. de Helen is also novelist. She wrote the Shirley Combs and Dr. Mary Watson series and a thriller, all self-published. Find out more about Sandra and her work at her substack site .

Emma Donoghue (2025 Medal Winner) was born in Dublin, Ireland—and based since 1998 in London, Ontario, Canada. She is a prizewinning author of fiction as well as drama and screenplays. The more lesbian-filled of her books are Learned by Heart, The Pull of the Stars, Frog Music, Life Mask, The Sealed Letter, Landing, Kissing the Witch, Hood, Stir-fry, and (for middle-grade readers) The Lotterys Plus One and The Lotterys More or Less. Find out more about Emma and her work at her website.

Catherine Lundoff (2025 Medal Winner) is the award-winning author of five short story collections: Unfinished Business: Tales of the Dark Fantastic, Out of This World: Queer Speculative Fiction Stories, Crave: Tales of Lust, Love and Longing, Night’s Kiss and A Day at the Inn, A Night at the Palace and Other Stories, and three novels (so far), Silver Moon: A Wolves of Wolf’s Point Novel, Blood Moon: A Wolves of Wolf’s Point Novel and Medusa’s Touch (written as Emily L. Byrne). She is the editor of the anthology Haunted Hearths and Sapphic Shades: Lesbian Ghost Stories and of the fantastical pirate anthology Scourge of the Seas of Time (and Space), and co-editor with JoSelle Vanderhooft of Hellebore and Rue: Tales of Queer Women and Magic. Her short stories have appeared in over 100 publications and her books have won accolades at the Golden Crown Literary Awards, the Bisexual Book Awards, the Rainbow Awards, and the Spectrum Awards. Catherine also writes erotica and romance as Emily L. Byrne. Her works and papers are collected in the SFWA/Gender Studies Collections at the Northern Illinois University Library and in the Tretter Collection at the University of Minnesota. In addition, she is the publisher at Queen of Swords Press. Find out more about Catherine and her work at her website or at her blog.

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