The ASWM Board of Directors established the Saga Award in 2012 to recognize outstanding contributions to women’s history and culture. The 2023 recipient is Dr. Mara Lynn Keller, recently retired from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). Her award letter reads in part:
This award recognizes your service to individual women as a teacher and mentor, and your major contributions to feminist philosophy, Goddess thealogy, the field of Women’s Spirituality, social justice, and global peace.
In your roles as teacher and mentor, you have always put the needs of your students first, demonstrating tremendous spiritual generosity in supporting your students and your peers in their academic and personal endeavors.
During your thirty-year tenure as Professor of Philosophy, Religion, and Women’s Spirituality, you have chaired many Ph.D. dissertations and MA theses, and have helped to generate a treasure trove of knowledge and a love for Women’s Spirituality. As Director of the Women’s Spirituality programs at CIIS, you fostered and developed a program offering an extraordinary curriculum and producing original scholarship that could have emerged no place else.
Your numerous articles and book chapters on your specialty, the Eleusinian Mysteries, have been widely read and influenced a generation of young scholars. We look forward to your forthcoming multi-volume work The Greater Mysteries of Demeter and Persephone and The Eleusinian Mysteries and Greek Goddess Traditions which will encapsulate a lifetime of research and thinking about the Mysteries.
Your commitment to embodied spirituality and multicultural eco-social justice is evidenced in your teaching, writing, and all your work in the world.
The ASWM awards program was established by our co-founder, Patricia Monaghan, to advance the best work in all fields related to goddess studies. Previous Saga Award honorees include Heide Goettner-Abendroth, Genevieve Vaughan, Z Budapest, Donna Read, Peggy Sanday, Arisika Razak, and Jane Caputi.