The American Folklore Society would like to congratulate all the honorees and prize recipients named at the 2018 annual meeting on October 17–20 in Buffalo, New York.
American Folklore Society Honors:
The following individuals received AFS lifetime achievement prizes for 2018:
- Maggie Holtzberg (Mass Cultural Council) received the Benjamin A. Botkin Prize for lifetime achievement in public folklore.
- Maribel Alvarez (The University of Arizona) received the Américo Paredes Prize for excellence in integrating scholarship and engagement with the people and communities one studies.
- Tom Davenport (Folkstreams) received the Judith McCulloh Award for lifetime service to the field.
- Simon J. Bronner (The Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg) received the American Folklore Society Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award.
Laura Wilson (University of Mississippi) received the Zora Neale Hurston Prize for the best student work on African American folklore.
Allan Jamieson, Sr. (Neto Hatinakwe Onkwehowe) received the Archie Green Award for a local cultural leader who has made significant contributions to their local community.
Jeanne Pitre Soileau received the Chicago Folklore Prize, honoring the best book of folklore scholarship of the year, for her book: Yo’ Mama, Mary Mack, and Boudreaux and Thibodeaux: Louisiana Children’s Folklore and Play.
The following individuals were named to the Fellows of the American Folklore Society: John Burrison (Georgia State University), Olivia Cadaval (Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage), Anand Prahlad (University of Missouri), and Katherine Galloway Young (San Francisco State University).
International stipends were awarded to: Abu Dayen (Jahangirnagar University), Miaomiao Fan (Anthropology Museum of Guangxi), Xiaoyan Liang (Anthropology Museum of Guangxi), Lucy Wright (Independent/University of East Anglia), Ikhlas Abdul Hadi (Universiti Putra Malaysia), and Tiziana Soverino (University College Dublin).
Gerald L. Davis Travel Awards were given to: Pascal Boucicaut (University of California, Berkeley), Andrew Carter (World Sound Entertainment; Watch Me Grow), Karen Hoffman (Oneida Nation of Wisconsin), Maria Lewis (Western Kentucky University), Mayuri Patankar (University of Delhi), and Lijun Zhang (Mathers Museum of World Cultures).
Additionally, ten international and US students received partial travel funding.
AFS Section Prizes and Awards:
The Children’s Folklore Section awarded the Aesop Prize for an exceptional book for children or young adults based on folklore to Jaime Hernandez for The Dragon Slayer: Folktales from Latin America, illustrated by F. Isabel Campoy (Toon Books, NY, 2017).
Aesop Accolade honorable mentions go to Sydelle Pearl for Wordwings; to Kevin Crossley-Holland for Norse Myths: Tales of Odin, Thor, and Loki, illustrated by Jeffrey Alan Love; to Tom Dawe for Spirited Away: Fairy Stories of Old Newfoundland, illustrated by Veselina Tomova; to Donald F. Montileaux for Muskrat and Skunk: A Lakota Drum Story, Lakota translation by Agnes Gay.
The Children’s Folklore Section’s Opie Prize for best book in children’s folklore was awarded to Jeanne Soileau for her book Yo’ Mama, Mary Mack, and Boudreaux and Thibodeaux: Louisiana Children’s Folklore and Play (University Press of Mississippi, 2016).
An Opie Prize Honorable Mention went to Tyler Bickford for his book Schooling New Media: Music, Language, and Technology in Children’s Culture (Oxford, 2017).
The Folk Belief and Religious Folklife Section awarded the William A. Wilson Undergraduate Paper Prize in Folk Belief and Religious Folklife to Rachel Schollaert (University of Minnesota) for the paper “Will You Follow Me?”
The section’s Don Yoder Prize for the Best Graduate Student Paper in Folk Belief or Religious Folklife was awarded to Yasmin Golan for the paper “New Souls: Life After Death of Animal Companions in Contemporary Hanoi.”
The Folklore and Education Section’s 2018 Dorothy Howard Prize for excellence in incorporating folklore into K-12 curricula went to the organization Kid Curators, in memory of Linda D’Acquisto.
Lacey Cornell (Kids Cook!) won the Folklore and Education Section’s Robinson, Roeder, Ward Award, given to an educator who is engaged in folklore, ethnography, or cultural heritage and K-12 education.
The Foodways Section awarded its 2018 Sue Samuelson Travel Award for Foodways Scholarship to Sarah Shultz (Memorial University of Newfoundland).
This year the History Section awarded two Wayland D. Hand Prizes for Outstanding Book in Folklore and History:
- Margarita Marín-Dale, Decoding Andean Mythology (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2016).
- Stacy I. Morgan, Frankie and Johnny: Race, Gender, and the Work of African American Folklore in 1930s America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017).
The Independents Section joined with two other sections to provide a pair of travel awards to support presentations at this meeting. The first, given by the Independents and the Women’s Section, went to Anne Pryor (Wisconsin Teachers of Local Culture), while the second, given by the Independents and the Public Programs Section went to Thomas Richardson (Independent).
The LGBTQIA+ Section awarded the Joseph Goodwin Queer Folkloristics Student Paper Prize to Caitlin Rimmer (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) for “There’s Nowt so Queer as Folk(lore).”
The New Directions in Folklore Section awarded the Bill Ellis Prize to Natalie Dignam (Memorial University of Newfoundland) for her paper “The Brewnettes: Women in Newfoundland’s Emerging Craft Beer Scene.”
The Nordic-Baltic Section awarded its 2018 Boreal Prize to Siria Kohonen (University of Helsinki) for the paper “Counterintuitiveness and Ritual Efficacy in Early Modern Karelian Healing: An Application of Ritual Competence Theory.”
The Public Programs Section—with a boost this year from Lisa Higgin’s creative online birthday fundraiser—gave Archie Green Student Travel Awards to Delainey Bowers (Western Kentucky University), Ashley Minner (Maryland Traditions; University of Maryland), Rodrigo Chocano Paredes (Indiana University), and Sally Anna Steiner (University of Wisconsin).
For several years the Transnational Asia-Pacific Section awarded the Jonathan T.Y. Yeh Award because of a generous contribution from Nora Yeh in memory of her father. The Section is grateful to Nora’s support and generosity in support of students working on folklore work on Asia and the diasporas. This tradition of generosity is carried on by Professor Fariha Khan (University of Pennsylvania), who now supports the Saboohi I. Khan Award in memory of her mother. This year’s Saboohi I. Khan Award was awarded to Junjie Jiang (Harvard University).
The Women’s Section’s 2018 Elli Kongas Maranda Prize Committee awarded this year’s professional prize to “Because of the War,” a film directed by Toni Shapiro-Phim.
The committee also awarded the 2018 Elli Kongas Maranda student prize to Natalie Dignam (Memorial University of Newfoundland) for her paper “The Brewnettes: Women in Newfoundland’s Emerging Craft Beer Scene.”
Finally, the Women’s Section’s Polly Stewart Travel Award was awarded to Chloe Brown (Western Kentucky University) and Kathryn Holmes (Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg).