Thomas J. Lyon Book Award in Western American Literary and Cultural Studies

Fifty-seven years after the founding of the Western Literature Association and Western American Literature, scholarship of the literary West is thriving in both quantity and quality. To honor outstanding, single-author scholarly books on the literature and culture of the American West, the Western Literature Association seeks nominations for the annual Thomas J. Lyon Book Award.

TO QUALIFY FOR THIS AWARD, BOOKS MUST

* have a 2022 publication date
* be an outstanding, single-author, book-length study on the literature and culture of the American West

The past presidents of the Western Literature Association sponsor this award and invite you TO NOMINATE A BOOK FOR THIS AWARD.

Readers who want to nominate a book can submit a statement of support to Anne Kaufman by June 1, 2023.

Self-nominating authors and presses, please send books directly to the committee members:

TBA

Nominations are due by June 1, 2023

Please contact Anne Kaufman for any questions you might have regarding this award.

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The WLA’s Thomas J. Lyon Book Award in Western American Literary and Cultural Studies Recipients

Year	Recipient	Publication
2022	Audrey Goodman	A Planetary Lens: The Photo-Poetics of Western Women’s Writing
2021	Susan Nance	Rodeo: An Animal History
2020	Cathryn Halverson	Faraway Women and the Atlantic Monthly
2019	Kirby Brown	Stoking the Fire: Nationhood in Cherokee Writing, 1907–1970
2018	Richard Etulain	Ernest Haycox and the Western
2017	Priscilla Solis Ybarra	Writing the Goodlife: Mexican American Literature and the Environment
2016	Susan Kollin	Captivating Westerns
2015	Lisa Tatonetti	The Queerness of Native American Literature
2014	Christine Bold	The Frontier Club: Popular Westerns and Cultural Power, 1880-1924
2013	Annette Kolodny	In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery
2012	Daniel Worden	Masculine Style: The American West and Literary Modernism
2011	Krista Comer	Surfer Girls in the New World Order
2010	John Beck	Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power, and Waste in Western American Literature
2009	Tom Lynch	Xerophelia: Ecocritical Explorations in Southwestern Literature
2008	Robert McKee Irwin	Bandits, Captives, Heroines, and Saints: Cultural Icons of Mexico's Northwest Borderlands
2007	John-Michael Rivera	The Emergence of Mexican America: Recovering Stories of Mexican Peoplehood in US Culture
2006	David Dorado Romo	Ringside Seat to a Revolution: An Underground Cultural History of El Paso and Juárez 1893-1923
2005	Stephanie LeMenager	Manifest and Other Destinies: Territorial Fictions of the Nineteenth-Century United States (University of Nebraska Press, 2004)
2004	Nathaniel Lewis	Unsettling the Literary West: Authenticity and Authorship (University of Nebraska Press, 2003)
2003	Audrey Goodman	Translating Southwestern Landscapes: The Making of an Anglo Literary Region (University of Arizona Press, 2002)
2002	James M. Cahalan	Edward Abbey: A Life (University of Arizona Press, 2001)
2001	Gary Scharnhorst	Bret Harte: Opening the American Literary West (University of Oklahoma Press, 2000)
2000	Susan Rosowski	Birthing a Nation: Gender, Creativity, and the West in American Literature (University of Nebraska Press, 1999)
1999	Thomas Pilkington	State of Mind: Texas Literature and Culture (Texas A&M University Press, 1998)
1998	Andrew Elkins	The Great Poem of the Earth: A Study of the Poetry of Thomas Hornsby Ferril (University of Idaho Press, 1997)