Hello, I am looking for information on how to nominate someone for a genius award. (If that is how it works…) ~Kris Barker

That’s a good question, Kris. Over on the Genius Awards homepage, it says: “There is no application process. A panel of Stranger editors and critics descends into a cave and conducts their deliberations by candlelight. Winners are notified via cake. The $5,000 comes with no strings attached.”

That’s not exactly true, that part about the cave, although we did have a couple meetings this year on that fake grass field at Cal Anderson Park. The Genius Awards committee is made up of the people who write about film, theater, visual art, and literature every week in The Stranger. So, for example, we did a series of really enthusiastic reviews of Strawberry Theatre Workshop’s stuff over the course of about two years (starting with Accidental Death of an Anarchist in 2005)—and anyone who’s been reading the theater section over the last couple years knows how rare the positive reviews in that section are—and the committee agreed that they deserved the attention and the money. Plus, they’d just been turned down for a residency at Hugo House, which none of us could understand, so the timing seemed perfect. That said, there were other organizations we talked about giving the award to this year, too.

There are a bunch of considerations that go into the awards, and it’s different every year: whereas Strawberry Theatre Workshop, a very small and relatively new organization, won the Genius Award for organization this year, On the Boards, a well-established and not-small organization, won the Genius Award for organization last year. (The evolution of the awards—and the idea that we give it to people and organizations at various stages in their careers—was explained in more detail in the introduction to last year’s Genius Awards issue.)

The first year of the awards, there was a way to nominate people, an email address, but that’s not in use anymore. (Although I still get spam in that folder.) The Genius Awards arise directly out of the arts coverage in The Stranger—if you read the paper close enough, you can usually pretty well guess who’s gonna get one. That said, if there is someone we should know about that, for whatever reason, we don’t, you can always send an email to editor@thestranger.com. We’d love to hear from you.