The following individuals received AFS lifetime achievement prizes for 2016:
- Barre Toelken (Utah State University, emeritus) received the AFS Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award.
- Andrea Graham (University of Wyoming) received the Benjamin A. Botkin Prize for lifetime achievement in public folklore.
- Susan Kalcik (Johnstown, Pennsylvania) received the Américo Paredes Prize, recognizing excellence in integrating scholarship and engagement with the people and communities one studies.
Jane Beck (Middlebury, Vermont) received the Chicago Folklore Prize, given to the best folklore book of the year, for Daisy Turner’s Kin: An African American Family Saga (University of Illinois Press).
Tyler D. Perry (University of South Carolina) received the Zora Neale Hurston Prize for the best student work in any medium on African American folklore for his paper “Married in Slavery Time: Jumping the Broom in Atlantic Perspective.”
The Fellows of the American Folklore Society named four new members: Paddy Bowman (Local Learning), Deborah Kapchan (New York University), Joseph Sciorra (Queens College), and Jack Zipes (University of Minnesota, emeritus).
AFS Gerald L. Davis Fund Travel Grants support the participation of persons of color in the annual meeting. The 2016 awards went to Martha Bannikov (University of Oregon), Ana Carolina Diaz Beltran (Pennsylvania State University), Martha Gonzalez (Scripps Coillege), Pheng Lim (Folk Arts-Cultural Treasures Charter School), Margaret Lyngdoh (University of Tartu), Yuko Nakamura (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee), Angel Quesada (Houston Arts Alliance Folklife + Civic Engagement Program), National Heritage Fellow Losang Samten, Widelin Seraphin (Pennsylvania State University), and Heider Tun (University of Minnesota).
AFS funded Travel Stipends for International Participants for the following recipients: Mrinal Bora (Gauhati University), Tulika Chandra (Shiv Nadar University), Shweta Sinha Deshpande (Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts), Ahmet Keskin (Ege Universitesi), Helen Klaebe (Queensland University of Technology), Dasa Licen (Institute of Slovenian Ethnology), Antti Lindfors (University of Turku), Juliana Magnúsdóttir (University of Iceland), Jennifer O’Reilly (Liverpool John Moores University), Natasa Polgar (The Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research), István Povedák (Hungarian Academy of Sciences and University of Szeged), Sinseingnon Germain Sagbo (Université d’Abomey-Calavi), and Piret Voolaid (Estonian Literary Museum).
Student Travel Stipends were awarded to Noah Morritt (Memorial University of Newfoundland ) and Kari Sawden (Memorial University of Newfoundland).
Section Prizes
The Children’s Folklore Section awards the Aesop Prize and Aesop Accolades each year to English-language fiction and nonfiction books for children and young adults.
The 2016 Aesop Prize went Lowriders to the Center of the Earth, written by Cathy Camper and illustrated by Raul The Third, and I Am Pan!, written and illustrated by Mordicai Gerstein.
The 2016 Aesop Accolades went to The Princess and the Warrior, written and illustrated by Duncan Tonatiuh, and The Storyteller, written and illustrated by Evan Turk.
The Children’s Folklore Section’s Opie Prize, for the best book-length scholarly publication in children’s folklore, was awarded to Children’s Games in the New Media Age: Childlore, Media and the Playground, ed. Andrew Burn and Chris Richards (Ashgate, 2014).
The Folk Arts Section awards the Warren E. Roberts Prize for the best undergraduate or graduate student paper on any aspect of folk art or material culture. The 2016 prize was awarded to Mathilde Frances Lind (Indiana University) for her paper “Handspinning Tradition: Traditionalization, Revival, and a Cyclical Spin on Honko’s ‘Folklore Process.’”
The Folk Belief and Religious Folklife Section presented its 2016 Don Yoder Prize for a student paper on religious folklife to Kristel Kivari (University of Tartu) for “Webs of Lines and Webs of Stories in the Making of Supernatural Places.”
The AFS Folklore and Education Section awarded the 2016 Dorothy Howard Prize, for work that effectively encourages K-12 educators or students to use or study folklore and folkloristic approaches, to Laurie Sommers, for “Teacher Resources Using Alan Lomax’s 1938 Field Recordings from Michigan and Wisconsin.”
The Foodways Section awarded the 2016 Sue Samuelson Award for Foodways Scholarship to the best student paper on food and foodways to Rachel Hopkin (The Ohio State University) for her paper “The Way of the Croissant.”
The History and Folklore Section awards the biennial Wayland Hand Prize for the best book combining history and folklore methods and topics. The 2016 prize was awarded to Jane Beck for Daisy Turner’s Kin: An African American Family Saga (University of Illinois Press). Honorable Mentions went to: Anthony Bak Buccitelli, City of Neighborhoods: Memory, Folklore, and Ethnic Place In Boston (University of Wisconsin Press, 2016); John Laudun, The Amazing Crawfish Boat (University Press of Mississippi, 2016); and James P. Leary, Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest, 1937-1946 (University of Wisconsin Press and Dust-to-Digital, 2015).
The Independent Folklorists’ Section and the Public Programs Section awarded the Independent Folklorists Travel Stipend to James F. Abrams of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, to present his paper, “A Steelworker’s Tale: Talking Empathy and Solidarity in a Labor Heritage Classroom.”
The Independent Folklorists’ Section and the Women’s Section awarded a travel stipend to Nancy Nusz of Paris, France, who presented in the forum entitled “Public Folklore in the Sunshine State: Past, Present and Future.”
The Public Programs Section awarded three Archie Green Travel Awards to defray meeting travel costs for graduate and undergraduate students who have an interest in working as public folklorists. The 2016 stipends went to Cristina Bennedetti (The Ohio State University), B. Marcus Cederström (University of Wisconsin, Madison), and Bethani N. Turley (The Ohio State University).
The Women’s Section has awarded its 2016 Polly Steward Student Travel Award to Afsane Rezaei (The Ohio State University) to attend the meeting to participate in the Feminist Retrospective forum and to present her paper, “The Iranian Domestic Rowze: Negotiated Community and Competitive Reputation.”