2025 AFS Honor, Prize, and Award Recipients

The American Folklore Society congratulates all the honorees and prize recipients named in 2025. For more information on prizes and honors awarded by AFS and its sections, please click here.

American Folklore Society Honors

The following individuals received AFS lifetime achievement awards for 2025:

Other AFS honors went to:

• Kimberly J. Lau (Professor of Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz) received the Chicago Folklore Prize, honoring the best book of folklore scholarship of the year, for Specters of the Marvelous: Race and the Development of the European Fairy Tale (Wayne State University Press).
• Beckett Price (University of Florida) received the Zora Neale Hurston Prize for their research paper “The Protest Folklore of Florida’s Black New Deal Writers”.
• Tanisha Brown (South Carolina Arts Commission) and Yvonne Manipon (Hawai’i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts) were the recipients of the 2025 Roger Welsch Opportunity Fund. This is an endowed fund from the Welsch family in honor of Nebraska folklorist and storyteller Roger Welsch that will support travel and attendance to the AFS annual meeting for those who are practicing in the field as folklorist professionals or students who are new to AFS, to have an opportunity to participate in the conference and learn with others in the field.
• Roshni Caputo-Nimbark (Memorial University, Newfoundland and Labrador), Detria Graham (Spartanburg School District, South Carolina), Kaiwen Lin (Ocean University of China), and Yvonne Manipon (Hawai’i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts) were the recipients of the Gerald L. Davis Presence Pathway Award this year. The Presence Pathway is part of the AFS Gerald L. Davis Grants established in memory of folklorist Gerald L. Davis and in partnership with the AFS Cultural Diversity Committee in 2023. The award provides funding for travel arrangements to support awardees’ presence and participation in the AFS annual meeting.
• Detria Graham was also the recipient of the Gerald D. Davis Project Pathway Award. This award provides funding for projects that participate in community scholarship in action, and that keep communities connected, whole, and active. Congratulations, Detria!
• Maygan Barker (Utah State University), Touhidul Islam (Indiana University), Olivia Phillips (Indiana University), and Salma Valdez-Marquez (University of Oregon) received the AFS Graduate Fieldwork Grant this year.

Fellows of the American Folklore Society

The following individuals were named to the Fellows of the American Folklore Society:

• Wanda Addison
• Maribel Alvarez
• Anthony Bak Buccitelli
• Néstor García Canclini
• Susan Davis
• Lisa Gabbert
• Uwemedimo Enobong Iwoketok
• Jon Kay
• Natalie Kononenko
• Yvonne Lockwood
• Lynne S. McNeill
• Bonnie Blair O’Connor
• Susan Roach
• Tok Thompson

AFS Section Prizes and Awards

The Children’s Folklore Section awarded the Aesop Prize and Accolades, which recognize exceptional folklore-based books aimed at children or young adults, to Dayeon Auh (Independent) for her book The Three-Year Tumble (NorthSouth Books).

The Children’s Folklore Section also awarded the W. W. Newell Prize for the best essay by students or emerging scholars on topics in children’s folklore to Molly Johnson (Indiana University) for her research “Power of Dynamics: Youth Organizations and How Play Leads to Social Development”.

The Folk Belief and Religious Folklife Section awarded the Don Yoder Graduate Student Paper Prize to Lodewyk Barkhuizen (University of Tartu, Estonia) for his work “The Cultivation of Not Knowing: Exploring the Interplay Between Intuition and Aleatory Uncertainty – Noise – In South African Traditional Healing Practices”.

The Folk Belief and Religious Folklife Section also gave the Leonard Norman Primiano Retired Scholar Travel Award to Anne Pryor (Wisconsin Arts Board, Madison, WI) to deliver her presentation “Restoring the Story of a Cloistered Nun” at the AFS annual meeting.

The Folklore and Education Section awarded the Dorothy Howard Prize, which recognizes a recently created work that effectively encourages K-12 educators or students to use the study of folklore and folkloristic approaches in an educational environment, to Folk Arts-Cultural Treasures Charter School (Philadelphia, PA) for their curriculum “Liberian Storytelling: A Sixth Grade Folk Arts Integrated Unit with Gbahtuo Comgbaye, Liberian Storyteller by Linda Deafenbaugh, Gbahtuo Comgbaye, and Marley Asplundh”.

The Folklore and Education Section also awarded the Robinson-Roeder-Ward Fellowships to help support the participation of educators at the AFS annual meeting. This year, the Category 1 of this prize was given to Avalon Nemec (Douglas MacArthur Girls Leadership Academy) for her presentation “Facilitating Cultural Connections between Artists and Students”, as well as to Lindsay Dodoras (formerly at Folk Arts-Cultural Treasures Charter School) for her presentation “Welcoming the Authentic Voice: Fostering Folk Art Education in the General Music Classroom”. The Category 2 of the prize was given to Shanita Sanders (Carroll Smith Elementary & Arkansas State University).

The Folklore and Science Section awarded the junior category of its Annual Prizes to Jessica Hogbin (Syracuse University) for her research “Melancholic Monsters: The Reality of Werewolves in Early Modern Italian Medical Literature”. The senior category of the prizes was won by Antti Lindfors (University of Helsinki) for his work “Vernacular Knowledge Production and Cross-Kingdom Kinship in Medicinal Mushrooms”.

The Foodways Section awarded the Sue Samuelson Award for best student paper on food and foodways to Enzina Marrari (Memorial University, Newfoundland and Labrador) for her research “In Search of Mostaccioli: An exploration of anticipatory grief, loss, and love through a lost childhood recipe”.

The History and Folklore Section awards the Wayland D. Hand Prize to authors and/or editors of outstanding books in English that combine historical and folkloristic content and perspectives. This year, the authored category was won by Ann Schmiesing (University of Colorado Boulder) for her monograph The Brothers Grimm: A Biography (Yale University Press). The prize was also awarded to John Minton (Purdue University Fort Wayne, emeritus) in recognition of special merit in writing and editing in his book Folk Music and Song in the WPA Ex-Slave Narratives (University Press of Mississippi).

The Independent Folklorists Section and the Public Programs Section jointly offer an Annual Meeting Award for independent folklorists who work within the field of public programming to attend the conference and to present their work. This year, Sayema Khatun was the recipient of this travel stipend.

The Independent Folklorists Section also partners with the Women’s Section to offer another Annual Meeting Award for independent folklorists who work on women’s issues to attend the annual meeting and to present their work. Mathilde Lind was the award recipient this year.

The Music and Song Section awarded the Bertrand H. Bronson Student Paper Prize to Olivia Phillips (Indiana University) for her work “Folk Song and the Voice: Toward an Ethnography of Singing”.

The Public Programs Section provides the Archie Green Student Travel Award to support graduate and undergraduate students who have an interest in working as public folklorists, or who have chosen an area of public folklore as a primary topic of research. This year, the recipient of this award was Suxiao Yao (Wuhan University, China).

The Women’s Section awards two Elli Köngäs-Maranda Prizes to recognize superior work on women’s traditional, vernacular, or local culture and/or feminist theory and folklore. This year, Niger Sultana (Indiana University) won the student category of the prizes for her paper “Embodied Faith: Performance as Agency in Contemporary Muslim Feminist Thought”. The professional/non-student prize was awarded to Ziying You (University of Georgia) for her book Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Chinese and Chinese-American Women: Racisms, Feminisms, Foodways.

The Women’s Section also awards the Polly Stewart Student Travel Stipend to emerging scholars who show promise of furthering the study of women’s folklore, gender issues in folklore, and/or feminist approaches to the study of folklore. This year, the First Place Prize was given to Taylor Nasim Stone (Indiana University), and the Second Place Prize went to Ciara Bernal (The Ohio State University).