At the SEAA business meeting at the AAA annual meeting in Denver the winners were announced for Book Prize, Best Student Paper, and (even numbered years) Media Production.
A short description follows, together with a link to the full description by the selection committees.

The 2015 Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize Winner is Rian Thum. 2014. The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History. Harvard University Press.

Rian Thum’s The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History is an extraordinary accomplishment that advances our understanding of sacred traditions of pilgrimage, local senses of history, and politics of nationalism. The book redefines the fields of Xinjiang history and Uyghur studies in a way that scholars in these fields will now have to take into account…
… Indeed the relative paucity of historical sources on the region in Turkic languages that Thum works with (rather than Chinese) may well be a source for the book’s creative methodology and a reason the book is so good.
Amazon entry, http://tinyurl.com/hsu2015thum

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The 2015 Theodore C. Bestor Prize for Best Student Paper was tied between:

“Modeling History: How Chinese Local Officials and Designers Meet in Museums” (Leksa Chmielewski Lee, U.C.-Irvine) and

“Negotiating Masculinities through the Game of Distinction: A Case Study of MOBA Gamers at a Chinese University” (Siyu Chen, U. Oslo)

For this year’s Theodore C. Bestor Prize for Outstanding Graduate Paper, there were 23 applicants.  Most of these were remarkably good papers indeed, and could, with a little polishing be publishable within a wide range of anthropological journals. In a unanimous decision the three judges for the Bestor Prize—Sealing Cheng, Joshua Hotaku Roth, and Gordon Matthews— found that three papers stood out for closer comparison. The result was an award tie and one honorable mention.

In a tied vote the judges awarded this year’s prize to Leksa Chmielewski Lee (University of California, Irvine) who wrote “Modeling History: How Chinese Local Officials and Designers Meet in Museums” and to Siyu Chen (University of Oslo) who wrote “Negotiating Masculinities through the Game of Distinction: A Case Study of MOBA Gamers at a Chinese University.”

For honorable mention the judges chose Suma Ikeuchi (Emory University):
“Of Two Bloods: Nation, Kinship, and Religion among Nikkei Brazilian Pentecostal Migrants in Japan.” Like the authors above, this paper is another example of the artful weaving together of ethnography and theory in a whole that transcends the sum of its parts.

Full discussion and description by selection committees [Annual Awards 2015 from SEAA: MS-Word document downloads to view or print]