2026 Evans Biography Award Winners
The Utah State University Mountain West Center for Regional Studies announces the 2026 winners of the Evans Biography Awards for books published in 2024 and 2025. 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.
The Evans Biography Awards Ceremony
Friday, September 25
Carolyn Tanner Irish Pavilion - Room 201
Mehdi Heravi Global Teaching & Learning Center – Utah State University
9:00am | Light Continental Breakfast
9:30am | Evans Biography Awards Presentation
Presentation will be followed by a book signing with the authors
Evans Biography Award Winner
John G. Turner
Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet
A national jury selected John G. Turner’s volume, “Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet” as the winner of the Evans Biography Award. “Joseph Smith” focuses on Joseph Smith Jr. (1805-1944), a religious leader who published the Book of Mormon and started what became the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Turner’s biography draws insights from newly accessible diaries, church records, and transcripts of sermons to illuminate Smith’s journey from impoverished farmhand to religious leader, crafting a balanced and extensively researched account of the Mormon prophet’s life.
John G. Turner is a professor of Religious Studies and History at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
One of his first encounters with the Latter-day Saint tradition came through attending the Hill Cumorah Pageant, and graduate studies in American religious history then kindled an abiding passion in the subject. The fruits of this passion are three books: Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (2012); The Mormon Jesus: A Biography (2016); Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet (2025). Turner is also the co-author of Antisemitism, U.S.A.: A History Podcast (2024). Turner loves spending time in archives, resurrecting the lives of women and men who made cultures that are very different from our own, and he loves spending time in the classroom, exploring those lives and cultures with students from all sorts of backgrounds.
Evans Handcart Award Winner
Margaret A. Brucia
The Key to Everything: May Swenson, A Writer’s Life
“The Key to Everything: May Swenson, A Writer’s Life” is an intimate and detailed biography of the American poet with a focus on the period between 1936-1959 when Swenson was living in New York City. Swenson (1913-1989) was born in Logan, Utah to Swedish immigrant parents and came of age as a writer during the Great Depression, the Federal Writers’ Project, and the emergence of gay culture. Margaret A. Brucia examines this period through Swenson’s own words through unpublished diaries and letters to friends, family, and colleagues.
The regional jury named one additional work as Evans Handcart Award Finalist from the over thirty submissions received. Laurie Lee Hall’s memoir “Dictates of Conscience: From Mormon High Priest to My New Life as a Woman” offers an articulate, forthright, and, at times, heartbreaking narrative of what it meant to transition from holding a patriarchal role in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints to being a woman.
Margaret A. Brucia taught Latin in New York and Rome for many years. She is a Fulbright scholar, the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome. Trained as a classicist, she has a special interest in women’s diaries and letters. She has published articles about prominent early twentieth-century New Yorkers, including two on May Swenson, on CUNY’s Gotham blog.
She now lives in the small village of Sea Cliff, on the north shore of Long Island, where May Swenson resided for the last twenty-two years of her life.