Major congratulations to these UNP authors who were recently recognized for their work!

2025 Pattis Family Foundation Creative Arts Book Award

Established by The Pattis Family Foundation in October 2023, The Pattis Family Foundation Creative Arts Book Award honors fiction or nonfiction books that inspire, illuminate, or exemplify the creative process in fields such as creative writing, dance, film and new media, music, theatre, and visual arts.

Inside the Mirror: A Novel (Nebraska, 2024) by Parul Kapur was selected as the winner.

2026 PEN America Literary Awards

The 2026 Literary Awards will confer nearly $350,000 to writers and translators. Spanning fiction, poetry, essay, translation, and more, these Longlisted books are dynamic, diverse, and thought-provoking examples of literary excellence.

Selected Misdemeanors: Essays at the Mercy of the Reader (Nebraska, 2025) by Sue William Silverman has been Longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.

Death Does Not End at the Sea (Nebraska, 2025) by Gbenga Adesina has been Longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry.

Western History Association Awards

To Educate American Indians (Nebraska, 2024) by Larry C. Skogen has won the Dwight L. Smith (ABC-CLIO) Award.

The Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize in the History of Journalism

Predicting the Winner: The Untold Story of Election Night 1952 and the Dawn of Computer Forecasting (Potomac Books, 2024) by Ira Chinoy is the winner.

David J. Weber Book Prize

The purpose of the prize is to promote fine writing and original research on the American Southwest.

Raid and Reconciliation: Pancho Villa, Modernization, and Violence in the U.S. Mexico Borderlands (Nebraska, 2024) by Brandon Morgan is a finalist.

Western Literature Association Awards

Unhomely Wests (Nebraska, 2024) by Steven Tatum was the winner of the 2025 Thomas J. Loyn Award which honors outstanding, single-author scholarly books on the literature and culture of the American West.

2025 Will Rogers Medallion Award Winners

The Will Rogers Medallion Award was originally created to recognize quality works of cowboy poetry that honored the Will Rogers heritage, but has expanded to include other works of Western literature and film.

Twisting in Air (Bison Books, 2024) by Carol Bradley is a Silver Medal Winner in the Western Biographies/Memoir category.

Mary’s Place (Bison Books, 2024) by Charlotte Hinger is a Gold Medal Winner in the Western Modern Fiction category.

Black Robes Enter Coyote’s World (Bison Books, 2024) by Sally Thompson is a Gold Medal Winner in the Western Nonfiction category.

Sandoz Studies, Vol 2 (Nebraska, 2024) by Renée M. Laegreid is a Bronze Medal Winner in the Western Nonfiction category.

Sybil Halpern Milton Memorial Book Prize

The Sybil Halpern Milton Book Prize honors the best book dealing with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust in its broadest context, covering every field represented in the German Studies Association, including history, political science and other social sciences, literature, art, and photography.

Spaces of Treblinka (Nebraska, 2024) by Jacob Flaws is on the shortlist.

SSAWW Edition Award

The SSAWW Edition Award is given every three years at the Society for the Study of American Women Writers’ conference to recognize excellence in the recovery of American women writers.

The Selected Works of Ora Eddleman Reed (Nebraska, 2024) edited by Cari M. Carpenter is the winner.

Willie Morris Awards

Each year, the Willie Morris Awards for Southern Writing honor some of the best literature telling rich, original stories about the US South marked by a strain of honest optimism.

Tell Me About Your Bad Guys (Nebraska, 2024) by Michael Dowdy was a Finalist in the Nonfiction category.

2024 MLA Matei Calinescu Prize

The Matei Calinescu Prize was established in 2016 in honor of Matei Calinescu, a Romanian poet and scholar who taught at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Swallowing a World: Globalization and the Maximalist Novel by Benjamin Bergholtz recieved an Honorable Mention.

Combining Adornian aesthetics and postcolonial theory, Benjamin Bergholtz’s Swallowing a World: Globalization and the Maximalist Novel conceptualizes a wideranging group of English-language novels from across the world as constituting a new genre of diverse and polyphonic fiction.

—The Prize Selection Committee

2025 Oklahoma Book Awards

Resisting Oklahoma’s Reign of Terror: The Society of Oklahoma Indians and the Fight for Native Rights, 1923–1928 by Joshua Clough was a finalist in the Nonfiction category.