News & Articles – Page 45

June 2, 2020January 9, 2024

Scholar Salon with Annie Finch: “Poetic Rhythm and the Goddess”

2020 Zoom Salon with Annie Finch

June 24, 2020 3 PM Eastern Daylight Time

“The enchanting chains of chanted language have the power to unite right and left brain, body and spirit, humanity and nature, women and the Goddess. No wonder the word ‘meter’ shares an Indo-European root with moon and mother.”

In this salon, poet Annie Finch explores how poetic meter in oral-based societies weaves spells for healing, worship, and handing down sacred knowledge and myth. After diving with us into the rhythms of Goddess-based poems from Ireland, Sumer, Greece, and India, Annie will close by sharing her own discoveries around the Sacred Meter Spiral.

Award-winning feminist poet and writer Annie Finch is the author of seven books of poetry including Eve, Calendars, The Poetry Witch Little Book of Spells, and the epic poem on abortion Among the Goddesses: An Epic Libretto in Seven Dreams, awarded the 2012 Sarasvati Award from ASWM. She is also the editor of Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (just out from Haymarket Books). Annie’s books about poetry include The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self and A Poet’s Craft: A Comprehensive Guide to Making and Sharing Your Poetry (University of Michigan Press). Known for her mesmerizing poetry readings, Annie is the founder of Poetry Witch Ritual Performances and has collaborated widely with artists in theater, dance, and music. She is based in Washington, DC and offers online classes for poets in metrical and formal craft, as well as holistic workshops and retreats that share the transformative magic of rhythmic language with seekers from all backgrounds. More at anniefinch.com.

Scholar Salons are an ASWM member benefit. Members will receive a link to join the Salon. If you are not yet an ASWM member, join here. The Salon recording will also be available to members after the event.

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 26, 2020January 9, 2024

2020 Kore Award for Best Dissertation

in Women and Mythology

Dr. Monica Mody is the winner of our 2020 Kore Award for Best Dissertation, for her work Claiming Voice, Vitality, and Authority in Post-Secular South Asian Borderlands: A Critical Hermeneutics and Autohistoria/Teoría for Decolonial Feminist Consciousness.

The award was granted at our 2020 Conference in New Mexico. Dr. Dawn Work-MaKinne, Chair of the Kore Committee, says in her letter to Dr. Mody:

The ASWM 2020 Kore Award Committee is proud and honored to name you the winner of the 2020 Award for Best Dissertation in Women and Mythology. Your dissertation, “Claiming Voice, Vitality, and Authority in Post-Secular South Asian Borderlands” is especially recognized for its daring work in methodology, vision and scope. The importance of decolonization in scholarship is vital, and your bringing that to the foreground is both bold and necessary. As a reader, I felt challenged and opened by the work, and wanted to apply what I was learning to my own scholarship. Your beautiful writing is a joy to read.

Dr. Mody leads a Scholar Salon, “Feminism on the Borderlands: Reclaiming Our Relationships with Modernity, Secularization, and Our Shadow Spaces.” in the member-only section of our website.

March 26, 2020January 9, 2024

2020 Saga Award Goes to Dr. Jane Caputi

Dr. Jane Caputi

The Board of Directors of the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology has selected Dr. Jane Caputi for the 2020 Saga Special Recognition Award for Contributions to Women’s History and Culture. Her vision and scholarship reach far beyond the confines of academic institutions. This award recognizes her service both to individual women and to the future that is being created by all women.

Dr. Caputi has advanced bold ideas as a feminist theorist, documentarian, and unflinching critic of popular culture. Her books, The Age of Sex Crime (1987), Gossips, Gorgons and Crones (1993), and Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power and Popular Culture (2004), have explored in depth difficult issues concerning violence against women and entrenched sexism in society.

Dr. Caputi’s work as a filmmaker has also advanced important concepts regarding violence against women, in the 2006 film, “The Pornography of Everyday Life,” and the worldwide movement of ecofeminism, in “Feed the Green: Feminist Voices of the Earth (2015).” Her forthcoming book, Call Your “Mutha”: A Deliberately Dirty-Minded Manifesto for the Earth Mother in the Anthropocene, will be released in August 2020.

Past winners of the Saga Award include Dr. Heide Goettner-Abendroth, Genevieve Vaughan, Donna Read, Z Budapest, Dr. Peggy Sanday, and Dr. Arisika Razak.

See the complete Saga Award letter 2020 here and read Dr. Caputi’s PBS interview about violence against women.