2024 Evans Biography Award Winners
The Utah State University Mountain West Center for Regional Studies announces the 2024 winners of the Evans Biography Awards for books published in 2022 and 2023. In existence for almost forty years, the Evans Awards continue to recognize the best of research and writing in biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs that focus on the stories of people who have shaped the character of the Interior West or “Mormon Country,” as the Evans family called it – a region historically influenced by Mormon institutions and social practices; however, neither the subjects of the books or the authors are required to be members of the faith.
Evans Biography Award winners Reid L. Neilson and Scott D. Marianno; Evans Handcart Award winner Amy Tanner Thiriot
Evans Biography Award Winner
Reid L. Nelson and Scott D. Marianno
Restless Pilgrim: Andrew Jenson’s Quest for Latter-day Saint History
A national jury selected Reid L. Neilson and Scott D. Marianno’s volume, Restless Pilgrim: Andrew Jenson’s Quest for Latter-day Saint History as the winner of the Evans Biography Award.
Restless Pilgrim focuses on Andrew Jenson (1850-1941), a Danish immigrant who was an Assistant Church Historian for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Neilson and Marianno’s in-depth study of Jenson’s long life and career chronicles trips around the world to secure documents from far-flung missions. It also tells of his public life as a newspaper columnist and interpreter of Latter-day Saint history.
The national jury also named one additional work as “Finalist, Evans Biography Award” from the over forty submissions received. Namely, Richard L. Saunders’ Dale L. Morgan: Mormon and Western Histories in Transition, is a biography of a prominent Western historian, and how, despite personal struggles, his commitment to serious scholarship launched new ways of understanding, studying, and retelling history.
Evans Handcart Award Winner
Amy Tanner Thiriot
Slavery in Zion: A Documentary & Genealogical History of Black Lives & Black Servitude in Utah Territory, 1847-1862
Slavery in Zion: A Documentary & Genealogical History of Black Lives & Black Servitude in Utah Territory, 1847-1862 combines genealogical and historical research to reveal events and relationships unknown or misunderstood for well over a century. In this book, Thiriot documents around 100 enslaved or indentured Black men, women and children in Utah Territory.
Slavery in Zion earned this year’s Handcart Award, with one juror on the regional committee noting: “This book is a meticulously researched reclamation project that bears significant fruit. This work corrects some historical errors and illuminates other areas, while acknowledging that there is still work to be done. It makes contributions not only to the history of slavery in the Utah Territory, but also adds to the broader history of slavery in the American West.”