The Society for American Archaeology (SAA) announced the recipients of its 2025 awards, which will be bestowed on April 25, 2025 at the SAA 90th Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado.
“The Society has a long tradition of acknowledging excellence in the field of archaeology through our awards, which pay tribute to those performing outstanding archaeological scholarship and research,” said SAA President Dan Sandweiss. “In addition to honoring highly trained and experienced archaeologists, SAA awards also identify up-and-coming leaders in the field. We are particularly pleased that this year’s Lifetime Achievement recipient is Joe Watkins, a past SAA president and only the second Native American SAA president.”
The press release shares that Watkins, a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, served as SAA president from 2019 to 2022. The only previous Native American SAA president was the SAA’s founder and first president, Arthur C. Clark. Dr. Watkins was selected because he has opened up the discipline for Indigenous archaeologists with accomplishments like beginning the SAA Native American Scholarships and “his tireless efforts to elevate both institutional and public images of archaeology as a profession, especially those in which Indigenous peoples globally are welcomed and respected as collaborators and beneficiaries.”
“To be recognized by my peers for an award of this magnitude is beyond belief,” Watkins said. “I am humbled and honored to have my contributions to the discipline considered to be on a similar level to those who have previously earned this award.”
SAA award recipients, such as for the Lifetime Achievement honor, are selected by dedicated and knowledgeable award committees made up of SAA member volunteers.
Watkins is the author of the forthcoming work from the University of Arizona Press Indigenizing Japan: Ainu Past, Present, and Future. The work provides a comprehensive look at the rich history and cultural resilience of the Ainu, the Indigenous people of Hokkaido, Japan, tracing their journey from ancient times to their contemporary struggles for recognition. It will be published in November 2025.
Reyes Ramirez, author of The Book of Wanderers, has been appointed Houston Poet Laureate for 2025-2027. The appointment was announced by the City of Houston at the Houston Public Library celebration of National Poetry Month and National Library Week. Library Director Sandy Gaw praised Ramirez as “the future of Houston’s literary landscape.”
The City of Houston press release described the appointment: “The Poet Laureate plays an important role in stimulating creative expression, fostering a deeper appreciation for poetry in all its forms, and using words to connect residents and visitors with Houston’s cultural fabric.”
Ramirez accepted the appointment and said, “As the next Poet Laureate, I want to show how amazing the city of Houston is for art, because Houston itself is a juncture of all sorts of diasporas, of cultures, of peoples that are talking to each other just so casually. I want to highlight how Houston incorporates histories of the South, of the borderlands, of the Southwest, of the West, of the urban, of the rural, of farms, of city skyscrapers. All these things are in conversation with each other. I want to show how Houston not only is a major point of literature for Texas and the United States but the world.”
Congratulations, Reyes!
Reyes Ramirez is a Houstonian of Mexican and Salvadoran descent. Ramirez’s dynamic short story collection, The Book of Wanderers, follows new lineages of Mexican and Salvadoran diasporas traversing life in Houston, across borders, and even on Mars. Themes of wandering weave throughout each story, bringing feelings of unease and liberation as characters navigate cultural, physical, and psychological separation and loss from one generation to the next in a tumultuous nation.
The Molino: A Memoir by Melani Martinez is on the shortlist for Kitchen Arts & Letters second annual Nach Waxman Prize for Food and Beverage Scholarship. According to the Kitchen Arts & Letters announcement: “The prize includes an award of $5,500 and highlights a U.S.-published book which invites the general public to seriously consider issues in culinary and beverage history, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, geography, and other fields of study.” Other authors on the shortlist are Christopher Beckman, Lisa Jacobson, Pascaline Lepeltier, and Nicola Twilley.
The winner of the prize will be announced May 6,2025. The prize is named for Nach Waxman (1936–2021), the founder of Kitchen Arts & Letters bookstore, where he ardently championed the work of food and beverage scholars, as well as authors who illuminated the culture behind cooking, eating, drinking, and culinary history.
Congratulations Mele!
About the book:
Set in one of Tucson’s first tamal and tortilla factories, The Molino is a hybrid memoir that reckons with one family’s loss of home, food, and faith.
Weaving together history, culture, and Mexican food traditions, Melani Martinez shares the story of her family’s life and work in the heart of their downtown eatery, El Rapido. Opened by Martinez’s great-grandfather, Aurelio Perez, in 1933, El Rapido served tamales and burritos to residents and visitors to Tucson’s historic Barrio Presidio for nearly seventy years. For the family, the factory that bound them together was known for the giant corn grinder churning behind the scenes—the molino. With clear eyes and warm humor, Martinez documents the work required to prepare food for others, and explores the heartbreaking aftermath of gentrification that forces the multigenerational family business to close its doors.
In the interview titled, “Corporate Power and a visit to Disneyland’s Mission Tortilla Factory,” Ochoa talked about what happened after 1492 contact with Europeans: “Eighty to ninety percent of the indigenous population is wiped out in the areas where Europeans go in a short period of time. And that leads to the takeover of those lands, the expansion of wheat and of European notions of food at the expense of indigenous ways of knowing and foodstuffs. And over time, indigenous foods were seen as poor people’s foods. Instead of talking about pulque and maize and eating from nature, the notion is that to live well, one has to eat wheat bread and drink wine like Europeans do.”
México Between Feast and Famine provides one of the first comprehensive analyses of Mexico’s food systems and how they reflect the contradictions and inequalities at the heart of Mexico. Ochoa examines the historical roots and contemporary manifestations of neoliberal policies that have reshaped food production, distribution, and consumption in Mexico. Ochoa analyzes the histories of Mexico’s mega food companies, including GRUMA, Bimbo, Oxxo, Aurrera/Walmex, and reveals how corporations have captured the food system at the same time that diet-related diseases have soared. The author not only examines the economic and political dimensions of food production but also interrogates the social and cultural impacts.
The Academy of American Poets has announced that The Whole Earth Is a Garden of Monsters | Toda la tierra es un jardín de monstruos, written by Manuel Iris (in photo above) and co-translated by Iris and Kevin McHugh, was selected by Giannina Braschi as the winner of the 2025 Ambroggio Prize. The Prize is given annually for a book-length poetry manuscript originally written in Spanish and with an English translation. The winners receive $1,000 and publication by the University of Arizona Press, a nationally recognized publisher of emerging and established voices in Latinx and Indigenous literature. The book will be published by the University of Arizona Press in 2026. Previous winners include Octavio Quintanilla, author and co-translator with Natalia Treviño; Margarita Pintado Burgos, with translator Alejandra Quintana Arocho; and Elizabeth Torres.
Braschi commented on the collection: “The poet pays homage to the migrant who will not be remembered or missed if lost. There is an intriguing parallel between two main characters—Juan Dominguez, migrant of fire, and Hieronymus Bosch, portraitist of fire—whose early lives are marked by the catastrophic fire from which they were born into new names, new ways, new lives.”
Manuel Iris is a Mexican-born American poet based in Ohio. He holds a Ph.D. in Romance Languages from the University of Cincinnati. The former Poet Laureate of Cincinnati, Iris currently serves as Writer-in-Residence for the Hamilton County Public Library; is Writer-in-Residence at Thomas More University; and is a member of Mexico’s National System of Art Creators.
Kevin McHugh is a translator, poet, and editor with over thirty years of experience in writing and teaching. He holds an MA in English from the University of Windsor, specializing in Irish literature. McHugh’s career spans both education and the literary world, having taught writing at the secondary and college levels, while also serving as a fellow of the National (Ohio) Writing Project.
We are thrilled to be publishing this award-winning collection. Congratulations, Manuel!
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About the Academy of American Poets
The Academy of American Poets is the United States’ leading champion of poets and poetry. The organization annually awards more than $1.3 million to poets across the nation. It also operates Poets.org, the world’s largest publicly funded poetry website, and organizes National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world. Additionally, the Academy publishes Poem-a-Day and American Poets magazine, provides free educational resources for K–12 educators and adult learners, and leads the Poetry Coalition, a network of organizations dedicated to promoting the vital role of poetry in our culture. Visit poets.org for more information.
To celebrate the award, Picq recently participated in a roundtable, “When Our Bodies Stand for Our Ideas” at the Plenary Session of Development Days Conference 2025 in Helsinki, Finland. Other roundtable participants were previous award-winner Teivo Teivanen, Barry Gills, who co-founded the award, and Bonn Juego, who is Director of the Finnish Society for Development.
Congratulations, Manuela!
About the book:
Delving into European political philosophy, comparative politics, and contemporary international law, the Savages and Citizens shows how the concept of indigeneity has shaped the development of the modern state. The exclusion of Indigenous people was not a collateral byproduct; it was a political project in its own right. The book argues that indigeneity is a political identity relational to modern nation-states and that Indigenous politics, although marking the boundary of the state, are co-constitutive of colonial processes of state-making. In showing how indigeneity is central to how the international system of states operates, the book forefronts Indigenous peoples as political actors to reject essentializing views that reduce them to cultural “survivors” rooted in the past.
Members of the Texas Institute of Letters (TIL) approved Octavio Quintanilla as one of thirty-two new writers to the TIL, a distinguished honor society established in 1936 to celebrate Texas literature and recognize distinctive literary achievement.
Las Horas Impossibles | The Impossible Hours, written by Quintanilla and co-translated by the poet and Natalia Treviño, is his latest literary work. Quintanilla is also the author of the poetry collections If I Go Missing (Slough Press, 2014) and The Book of Wounded Sparrows (Texas Review Press, 2024). He is the founder and director of the literature and arts festival VersoFrontera; publisher of Alabrava Press; and former poet laureate of San Antonio, Texas. His visual poems Frontextos have been published and exhibited widely. He teaches literature and creative writing at Our Lady of the Lake University.
In the media release, TIL President David Bowles said of the newly inducted members: “We are overjoyed and honored to welcome such a varied and stellar group of literary talents. These folks are some of the very best in their respective fields, and we congratulate not only their nomination and induction, but also the years they have each dedicated to Texas letters.”
Bojan Louis, contributor to The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature, was named a USA (United States Artists) Fellow by Chicago-based nonprofit organization United States Artists. The organization recognizes artists in writing, design, crafting, dance, film, media, music and theater. The USA Fellowship comes with an unrestricted $50,000. Since its inception in 2006, the program has distributed more $41 million to more than 1,000 artists.
“We are honored to announce the 2025 USA Fellowship with this wonderfully skilled and multifaceted group of Fellows,” said Judilee Reed, president and CEO of United States Artists, in a statement. “Much like this cohort, our support through the USA Fellowship is enduring and manifold, extending beyond a momentary and monetary contribution to establish a durable and sustainable relationship that artists may draw on at each stage of their careers.”
Louis is Diné of the Naakai dine’é, born for the Áshííhí. In addition to teaching at the Institute for American Indian Arts, Louis is an associate professor of English and American Indian Studies in the University of Arizona College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. He said, “I write a lot about addiction, fatherhood and being Navajo – what that means and what it means to be a wanderer. My real love is fiction and short stories. I love poetry, but I gravitate toward short stories.”
In the new book The Hohokam and Their World: An Exploration of Art and Iconography, authors Linda M. Gregonis and Victoria Riley Evans offer readers the opportunity to explore how various images and objects may have been used by the Hohokam, and what the icons and objects may have meant, including how the Hohokam conveyed ideas about water, the Sonoran Desert, the ocean, travel, ancestors, and the cosmos. Today, the authors share photos of artifacts, places, and notes on how they researched this fascinating topic.
By Linda M. Gregonis and Victoria Riley Evans
We met at an artifact analysis class taught by Linda at Pima Community College Archaeology Centre, where we discovered a common interest in Hohokam pottery and a fascination with design. We started working together, analyzing pottery for a cultural resources management company in Tucson.
In the U.S. Southwest, pottery is used to determine cultural affiliation and time period because artists changed the designs through time. The examples with animals shown above date to the AD 700s and 800s; the examples with more abstract curves and zigzags date to the AD 600s.
One reason that pottery can be used to determine cultural affiliation is that the artists worked from a shared palette of symbols and design layouts. For Hohokam pottery, the layouts and symbols are similar across a large area, from Gila Bend east towards the Safford area and from south of Tucson to the Verde Valley.
As we analyzed pottery, we began to wonder what the symbols meant to the people who made the vessels and if and how the symbols were used across different artistic media, such as shell, stone, and rock imagery. We wondered how various images connected the Hohokam to groups in West Mexico and the U.S. Southwest and how those images fit in to Hohokam views of the world. So we decided to write a book.
We started our research by looking through the many site reports that have been written since the 1960s as a result of environmental laws that require archaeological work to be done prior to land development. We also visited museums and rock imagery sites, searching for objects and images that could give us a glimpse into the Hohokam world.
Victoria Evans taking snapshots at Picture Rocks and imagery from this site near Tucson.
Linda Gregonis looking at collections at the Amerind Foundation.
Along the way, we discovered numerous examples of particular images that were used in a variety of artistic media. We used those images—important, widespread cultural symbols—to suggest connections to a deep past in West Mexico and more recent connections to the O’odham and the Sonoran Desert. The connections and their possible meanings form the body of our book.
This image can be found on pottery, stone, and shell throughout the Hohokam region. Because of its resemblance, it has been interpreted as a “cipactli,” a mythical Mesoamerican beast. We think it may be a Hohokam interpretation of that beast, but that it is more likely a representation of a coyote or fox—both animals with “trickster” qualities. Coyotes are especially important in O’odham lore as one of the Creators. This pendant is made from a piece of shell.
This stone censor or bowl in the Amerind Foundation’s collection depicts stick figures with what appear to be tails carved around the entire surface. It is possible that this represents lizards transforming into humans. The ability to transform is a widely held belief among Indigenous people throughout the Americas.
On this piece of pottery, also from the Amerind Foundation, there is a bird, or perhaps a masked bird-human facing down into a bowl. Several other birds or bird-humans occur around the rim of the bowl, all with their heads pointing toward the center. The layout of the bowl is suggestive of a Mesoamerican voladores ritual where men dress as birds in directional colors (red for east, black for west, white for north, and yellow for south) and descend upside down on ropes from a symbolic world tree. For the Hohokam, this may have represented a transformative ritual (human-bird, bird-human) or was a symbolic way of connecting them to a West Mexican ritual.
Boulders at Painted Rocks, a rock imagery site west of Gila Bend. The lizards, bighorn sheep, snakes and other images are symbols that can be found on shell, pottery, and stone (as well as other rock imagery) throughout the Hohokam region. This site combines Hohokam and Patayan imagery. The Patayan were people who lived from the western Phoenix Basin west into California. There is evidence that Hohokam and Patayan people lived together in this western portion of the Hohokam region.
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Linda M. Gregonis is an independent researcher with a master’s degree in anthropology from the University of Arizona. She has spent more than forty years researching various aspects of Hohokam culture, including iconography, while working primarily as a ceramics analyst. Victoria R. Evans is an archaeologist who has conducted research in the Sonoran Desert for more than twenty years. Evans recently retired from New Mexico Highlands University, where she served as the anthropology laboratory director.
Arizona Friend Trips authors Lisa Schnebly Heidinger and Julie Morrison appeared on Phoenix’s Channel 5 “Good Morning Arizona” program last week. They shared tales of travels that inspired the new book and also revealed their new podcast “Celebrating Arizona.” In the interview, Morrison explained, “We started taking trips near where each of us lived . . . and our first trip was to El Tiradito, ‘the sinners shrine’ in Tucson.” Each place they visited became a chapter in the book.
In the Celebrating Arizona podcast, “Two Arizona writers who adore their state share travels to landmarks famous and obscure, with lots of impressions, insights and laughter along the way,” as described on the podcast webpage. In the first episode, they visit the famous El Tovar hotel at the Grand Canyon.
In Arizona Friend Trips, Lisa Schnebly Heidinger and Julie Morrison invite readers to explore the state’s most cherished places through a blend of poetry, prose, and photography. From the iconic landmarks to hidden gems, each chapter of this captivating travelogue provides a rich tapestry of historical insight, personal anecdotes, and emotional reflections, painting a vivid portrait of Arizona’s diverse landscapes and vibrant culture. Be part of this unique journey as Lisa and Julie embark on an unforgettable adventure, filled with laughter, nostalgia, and a deep appreciation for the beauty of the Grand Canyon State.
Arizona Friend Trips is a celebration of friendship, discovery, and the enduring spirit of exploration.
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