Awards – Page 2

May 14, 2023January 9, 2024

Dr. Mara Lynn Keller Receives 2023 Saga Award

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.

April 3, 2022January 9, 2024

2022 Sarasvati Award Goes to Judy Grahn and Nightboat Books

Eruptions of Inanna: Justice, Gender, and Erotic Power

We are pleased to announce that Eruptions of Inanna: Justice, Gender, and Erotic Power by Judy Grahn has won the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology’s Sarasvati Nonfiction Book Award. The award letter to Nightboat Books, which will be read at our symposium on April 10, reads as follows:

The clarity of Grahn’s prose, enlivened by flights of poesy, makes this a work of scholarly heft and intellectual precision a literary delight.

Grahn takes feminist, queer, and literary approaches to varied sacred narratives, eliciting the ethical vision implicit in each and restoring goddess/woman/womb to the rightful place of centrality and seat of power, whether revered or contested. The author also brings geographic, astronomical, and lexical considerations to bear on her interpretations, resulting in stunning revelations on virtually every page.

Eruptions of Inanna offers original insights on a spectrum of literary sources and associated cultural patterns. The book reveals something that generations of biblical scholars combing the Hebrew scriptures for Sumerian elements have failed to discover, namely, the profound indebtedness of the Book of Job to the hymns of Inanna in its moral premise, narrative frame, dialogic exchanges, and specific phrasing and theological formulations. Beyond this towering contribution, readers are rewarded with fresh perspectives on any material already familiar to them, such as the Gilgamesh epic, the Greek pantheon, Helen of Troy, and South Asian goddess traditions, as well as the titled Inanna. Those immersed in study of Inanna and the excellent scholarship already available will find in Eruptions of Inanna more majesty, lavish beauty, and all-encompassing power than previously envisioned as the book integrates the diverse and seemingly divergent aspects of Inanna into a cosmic whole.

While focusing on Near Eastern and Mediterranean materials, the inclusion of South Asian examples and cases further afield (Native American, African) gives the work a global sweep. The pressing ethical concern at the heart of the book is the conflictive value system of gender-based violence and oppression that now threatens life on the planet. Drawing on sacred stories spanning millennia, the author elicits an inclusive, cooperative worldview based on earthly, celestial, and human female bodily cycles of creation, transformation, and regeneration. The book steers us toward the goal of an equitable, compassionate world of collective harmony and flourishing.

We congratulate Nightboat Books on producing a beautiful book whose design allows the lapidary prose of the brilliant author to shine on its pages.

Judy Grahn is an internationally known poet, author, mythographer, and cultural theorist. Her works include seven books of nonfiction, two book-length poems, five poetry collections, a reader, and a novel. An early Gay activist who walked the first picket of the White House for Gay rights in 1965, she later founded Gay Women’s Liberation and the Women’s Press Collective. Her intention with writing is to replace obsolete philosophies with better ones.

See the Symposium page for more information.

REGISTER HERE FOR SYMPOSIUM:

General public ($160) register here.
Members sign in and register with $50 discount here.
Join/Renew your ASWM membership here.
Questions? Ask us: symposium@womenandmyth.org

July 27, 2021January 9, 2024

The Sarasvati Nonfiction Book Award Application

Sarasvati Nonfiction Book Award submissions deadline has been extended: Dec. 31 2021

The Sarasvati Nonfiction Book Award solicits nonfiction books published in English during 2019-21 in the field of women and mythology. Named for the Hindu goddess of learning and the creative arts, the Sarasvati Award from the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology (ASWM) honors scholarly work in the fields of goddess studies and women and mythology. Anthologies and self-published books are not eligible for consideration. Applications must be submitted by publisher and must be received by the ASWM Sarasvati Award Committee no later than December 31, 2021. The award will be presented during ASWM’s next biennial conference.

Publishers Submission Form: 2021 Sarasvati Submission Form

Previous winners of the Sarasvati Award for Nonfiction:

2018: Sheela na gig: The Dark Goddess of Sacred Power by Starr Goode (Inner Traditions)

2016: The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World by Adrienne Mayor (Princeton)

2014: The Dancing Goddesses: Folklore, Archaeology and the Origins of European Dance by Elizabeth Wayland Barber (Norton)

2012: Sacred Display: Divine and Magical Female Figures of Eurasia by Miriam Robbins Dexter and Victor Mair (Cambria Press)

For questions please contact the Awards Committee

March 27, 2020January 9, 2024

2020 Demeter Award for Leadership (2): Vicki Noble

vicki noble receives Demeter award for leadership in women’s spirituality

This year the ASWM Board of Directors has chosen to grant the Demeter Award for Leadership in Women’s Spirituality to two outstanding women, in recognition of their lifetime achievements in forging new paths for women. Vicki Noble is this year’s recipient, along with Dr.Judy Grahn.

This award is given in recognition of Vicki’s intellectual leadership as a feminist writer, scholar, and wisdom teacher. Her teaching career began at Colorado College in the women’s interdisciplinary program that she created, and continued as scholar in residence in the Women’s Spirituality graduate program at New College of California and California Institute of Integral Studies, where she explored matriarchal and goddess studies. Drawing on her work with archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, Vicki has lectured and taught internationally at the graduate level on female shamanism and the healing arts, as well as having written several books that articulate ritual healing processes.

With the1981 publication of the first feminist-inspired tarot deck, Vicki placed in women’s hands the now famous “Motherpeace Tarot Deck,” which was conceived, researched, and published with artist Karen Vogel. This influential deck has sold over 200,000 copies, internationally. With the deck and accompanying book, she has inspired and supported women in the quest for a feminist-inspired spiritual practice.

Vicki’s scholarly and widely translated book The Double Goddess: Women Sharing Power (2003) provides a synthesis of archaeology, prehistory, and mythology of ancient Goddess cultures, revisioning the role of women as central to shamanism and tantric practice in all of AfroEurAsia for at least ten millennia. Her exploration of cross-cultural images and icons of sacred double females in Asia, Africa, and Old Europe reveals a lineage of women’s leadership and social power that runs forward from prehistoric times. Translated into Spanish, French, Italian, The Double Goddess received the 2003 Enheduanna Award for Excellence in Women-Centered Literature.

Previous honorees for the Demeter Award include Margot Adler (2010), Charlene Spretnak (2012), Jean Shinoda Bolen (2014), Elinor Gadon and Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum (2016), and Kathy Jones (2018).

Read the 2020 Demeter Award letter and learn more about Vicki’s work at vickinoble.com.

March 27, 2020January 9, 2024

2020 Demeter Award for Leadership (1): Dr. Judy Grahn

Judy Grahn Receives Demeter Award for leadership in women’s spirituality

This year the ASWM Board of Directors has chosen to grant the Demeter Award for Leadership in Women’s Spirituality to two outstanding women, in recognition of their lifetime achievements in forging new paths for women. Dr. Judy Grahn is this year’s recipient, along with Vicki Noble.

The award is given to Dr. Grahn in recognition of her decades of writing, activism, visionary scholarship and leadership as a founding mother of feminist philosophy, literature, theory and poetry in action. As an internationally celebrated poet, author, mythologist, cultural theorist, teacher, she exemplifies tireless intellectual leadership in poetic expression of feminist ethical and spiritual values, and wide-ranging contributions to feminist infrastructure and culture.

Judy’s poetry has fueled both the Feminist and Lesbian-Feminist movements, in the US and numerous other countries through such works as the mythic-history Another Mother Tongue (1984, 1991) which was vital to the Lesbian/Gay movement during the 1980s and 1990s. We honor her poetic growth through Lesbian literary activism to encompass women’s spirituality – acknowledging the inseparability of feminist politics and women’s spirituality. Her work has resulted in fourteen published books with two more in process, including two book-length poems, several poetry collections, a reader, an ecotopian novel, and five non-fiction books.

In other foundational contributions, an award in her name is given every year to a notable Lesbian author. ASWM joins the many other organizations honoring her significant contributions; she has received over twenty awards, including Lifetime Achievement Awards from Triangle Publishing, Golden Crown Trailblazers Award, and San Francisco Gay Pride Parade Lifetime Achievement Grand Marshall, 2014 as well as two Lambda Literary Awards, two American Book Awards, a Foremothers of Women’s Spirituality Award, a Stonewall Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Award.

In recent works such as Simple Revolution: the Making of an Activist Poet (memoir), 2012; her poetry as the subject of a dedicated issue of The Journal of Lesbian Studies; and the collection, love belongs to those who do the feeling, 2008, she particularly draws forth women’s power to see and change the course of their lives and society. We also look forward to Judy’s upcoming book of poetry: Living in a Sentient World, which, no doubt, will continue to advance her vision of a more egalitarian and peaceful world.

Read our 2020 Demeter Award letter and learn more about Judy’s current work at judygrahn.org