EVENT SPONSORS
UA SOUTHWEST CENTER | W.K. KELLOGG FOUNDATION | ZINACANTAN MEZCAL | YWCA | CHICANOS POR LA CAUSA
The Howard Scott Gentry Award was established in 2017 by Dr. Gary Nabhan and the Agave Heritage Festival to recognize leaders in binational collaborative research on agave conservation and use.
In 2025, we recognize Diana Pinzón and Faby Torres Monfils for their leadership and uncompromising commitment to core values of the cultural and ecological connections and foundations that support mezcal production.
Lecture: 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM
Conversations: 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
Previous Gentry Awardees
2017: Ana Guadalupe Valenzuela Zapata
2018: Patricia Coluinga and Daniel Zizumbo Villareal
2019: Tony Burgess (Listen below!)
2022: Luis Egiarte and Valeria Souza
2023: Carlos Camarena
Gary Nabhan (Honorary Gentry Award)
2024: César Iván Ojeda Linares
2025: Diana Carolina Pinzón and Fabiola “Faby” Torres Monfils
Howard Scott Gentry (1903 - 1993) was a botanist, ethnographer, and agricultural explorer recognized as the world’s leading authority on agaves.
Dr. Gentry made his first field trip to the Sierra Madre Occidental of Mexico in 1933. He spent most of the next twenty years exploring and recording the plant life of northwestern Mexico, captured in among other works his beautiful work Rio Mayo Plants, documenting the plants and ethnobotanical knowledge of the northern Sierra Madre. He worked for the United States Department of Agriculture from 1950 to 1971 as an agricultural explorer traveling the world to collect useful plants. He was then a research botanist with the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, Arizona , where he pursued his investigations into agave, culminating in the seminal Agaves of Continental North America. Late in his life, he continued his work with arid land crops at his Experimental Farm in Murrieta, CA until his last day.
The Gentry Award recognizes and aims to perpetuate what Dr. Gentry’s recognized as the Human-Agave Symbiosis, in which, “the uses of agave are as many as the arts of man have found it convenient to devise."
For more information on the life and work of Dr. Gentry, please see this 1994 article by Isabel Shipley Cunningham, “Howard Scott Gentry, 1903–1993.“
Caption of picture: Howard Scott Gentry, February 1981. Photo by Richard Felger.