Forty-three 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 announces the tenth annual Thomas J. Lyon Book Award. Books qualifying for this monetary award will have a 2008 publication date.

TO QUALIFY FOR THIS AWARD, BOOKS MUST

• have a 2008 publication date
• be an outstanding, single-author, book-length study on the literature and culture of the American West

send a statement of support and three copies of the book by May 20, 2009 to
 
Robert Thacker
Executive Secretary, Western Literature Association
Canadian Studies Program
St. Lawrence University
Canton  NY 13617

E-mail: rthacker@stlawu.edu

2008 Award Recipient: Robert McKee Irwin, Bandits, Captives, Heroines, and Saints: Cultural Icons of Mexico's Northwest Borderlands

2007 Award Recipient: John-Michael Rivera, The Emergence of Mexican America: Recovering Stories of Mexican Peoplehood in US Culture

2006 Award Recipient: David Dorado Romo, Ringside Seat to a Revolution: An Underground Cultural History of El Paso and Juárez 1893-1923

2005 Award Recipient: Stephanie LeMenager, Manifest and Other Destinies: Territorial Fictions of the Nineteenth-Century United States (University of Nebraska Press, 2004)

2004 Award Recipient: Nathaniel Lewis, Unsettling the Literary West: Authenticity and Authorship (University of Nebraska Press, 2003)

2003 Award Recipient: Audrey Goodman, Translating Southwestern Landscapes: The Making of an Anglo Literary Region (University of Arizona Press, 2002)

2002 Award Recipient: James M. Cahalan, Edward Abbey: A Life (University of Arizona Press, 2001)

2001 Award Recipient: Gary Scharnhorst, Bret Harte: Opening the American Literary West (University of Oklahoma Press, 2000)

2000 Award Recipient: Susan Rosowski, Birthing a Nation: Gender, Creativity, and the West in American Literature (University of Nebraska Press, 1999)

1999 Award Recipient: Thomas Pilkington, State of Mind: Texas Literature and Culture (Texas A&M University Press, 1998)

1998 Award Recipient: Andrew Elkins, The Great Poem of the  Earth:  A Study of the Poetry of Thomas Hornsby Ferril (University of Idaho Press, 1997)