The Committee on LGBTQ+ [Z] Issues in Linguistics  (COZIL) and the LSA Executive Committee are pleased to announce that Dr. Rusty Barrett is the LSA’s 2023 Arnold Zwicky Award recipient.

Dr. Rusty Barrett is a world-renowned sociolinguist and linguistic anthropologist at the University of Kentucky. His research areas are primarily in Mayan languages and in language, gender, and sexuality. His scholarly accomplishments include two forthcoming co-edited handbooks on Language, Gender, and Sexuality, which are already proving valuable resources for scholars and teachers in these fields. His public-facing work has addressed how the mainstream appropriation of slang from queer communities of color has elided those communities' rich histories. Dr. Barrett has served as a mentor for numerous student projects on LGBTQ+ topics, not just in his home department but also across many institutions and fields. Within the LSA, Dr. Barrett co-convened the original Special Interest Group on LGBTQ+ Issues in Linguistics, which later became COZIL.

We are pleased to recommend Dr. Barrett for the Arnold Zwicky Award. He has a vision of what we—linguists, scholars, educators—can be if we consider exactly what it means to understand others.