501 (c) (3) Organization
The ReadWest Foundation, Inc, presents four annual awards: the President's Award, which recognizes a major career contribution to excellence in Western literature; and three (3) Featured Author awards, which recognizes authors with current publications that clearly represent excellence in Western literature. Featured Author awards are given to authors of fiction and nonfiction.
The award winners are selected by the ReadWest Foundation officers and board of directors, and are announced in the summer of the award year. Strong consideration is given not only to their quality of work, but also to the impact their work has had on sales, reviews, TV or cinema, and representation of the genre. Suggestions can be submitted to contact@readwestfoundation.org and must be received by December 31 prior to the year of publication of the author's next work.
ReadWest Foundation Awards for Excellence in Western Literature
2014 Awards
President's Award
Robert M. Utley - Nonfiction
Robert M. Utley is an American author and historian who has written sixteen books on the history of the American West. He is a former chief historian for the National Park Service. The Western History Association annually gives out the Robert M. Utley Book Award for the best book published on the military history of the frontier and western North America (including Mexico and Canada) from prehistory through the 20th century.
Award for Literary Excellence
S. C. Gwynne (nonfiction)
S. C. Gwynne is a senior editor for Texas Monthly and the author for the Pulitzer Prize nominated book Empire of the Summer Moon. His next book, Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson, is due out in September.
Award for Literary Excellence
James Reasoner (fiction)
Besides writing under his own name, James Reasoner has written under 40 pseudonyms, including Dana Fuller Ross and the acclaimed Wagons West series. Regarded as one of the Western genre's hardest working authors, Reasoner recently finished his 310th novel.
Award for Literary Excellence
Doug J. Swanson (nonfiction)
Besides writing a biography on the infamous Texas gangster Benny Binion, Doug J. Swanson is an investigative reporter for The Dallas Morning News, and a novelist. His novel Big Town was a finalist for the Edgar Award and won the John Creasey Award from the British Crime Writers Association. He has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing, and has twice been named the top newspaper reporter in Texas. Swanson is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, and was a John S. Knight Fellow in Journalism at Stanford University. He is recognized this year for his biography: Blood Aces: The Wild Ride of Benny Binion, the Texas Gangster Who Created Vegas Poker.
2012 Awards
President's Award
Robert Vaughan
Robert Vaughan has written for over fifty years, more than 400 books have been published including more than 200 Westerns, using his own name and several pseudonyms. Many of these are ghost-written projects for well known authors, several of which have made the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and USA Today Best Seller lists.
His novel Andersonville was a television mini-series on TNT.
Award for Literary Excellence
Thomas Cobb - Fiction
Thomas Cobb is an American novelist and author of the 1987 novel Crazy Heart which was adapted into the 2010 Academy Award winning 2009 film "Crazy Heart." Cobb attended the University of Houston, where he studied fiction writing with Donald Barthelme. Barthelme also advised him on the writing of Crazy Heart. Thomas Cobb has taught at Eastern Arizona College and in the Arizona State Prison System. Since 1987, he was a member of the faculty of Rhode Island College and is Professor of English and Director of Performing & Fine Arts Commission. He taught fiction writing and literature, and was the director of the program for 18 years. In 2010 he received the Rhode Island College Alumni Faculty Award.
Award for Literary Excellence
Nancy Plain - Nonfiction
Nancy Plain has written ten histories and biographies for young people. Her biography of the artist Mary Cassatt was selected for the New York Public Library’s 1994 list of “Books for the Teen Age.” Her books Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and the French Revolution and Eleanor of Aquitaine and the High Middle Ages were named by the Children’s Book Council/NCSS as “Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People,” 2002 and 2007, respectively.
President's Award
Jory Sherman
Jory Sherman, who has been a full-time writer for over fifty years, began his writing career as a poet in San Francisco. Jory has had four books of poetry published, more than 1000 articles, 500 short stories, and more than 300 books from nearly all major New York publishing houses. He is also credited for having come up with the name "ReadWest" to use as a marketing tool to promote Western literature.
2011 Awards
Award for Literary Excellence
Stephen Harrigan - Fiction
Stephen Harrigan is the author of four novels. His first novel, Aransas, published by Alfred A. Knopf, was listed by the New York Times as a notable book of 1980. Jacob’s Well was published by Simon and Schuster in 1984 and cited as one of the year’s best books by The Washington Post and The Dallas Morning News. In 2000, Knopf published his novel, The Gates of the Alamo, which became a New York Times bestseller and notable book, and which received a number of awards, including the TCU Texas Book Award, the Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, and the Spur Award for the Best Novel of the West. His latest novel, Remember Ben Clayton, was published by Knopf in May and praised by Booklist as a "stunning work of art" and by The Wall Street Journal as a "a poignantly human monument to our history."
Award for Literary Excellence
William Groneman III - Nonfiction
Bill Groneman sent shock waves through the Texas historical and antiquarian document communities in 1994 when he dared to suggest that an iconographic Mexican “diary” of the Texas revolution was a modern day fake. His session at the 1995 Texas State Historical Association meeting in San Antonio, where he presented a paper on the subject and on his book, Defense of a Legend, drew the largest crowd in the association’s one hundred year history. The controversy continues to this day.
Award for Literary Excellence
Don Bendell - Fiction
Don Bendell’s current western Strongheart has 16 5-star reviews on amazon.com. He is the author of 26 books with over 2,500,000 books in print worldwide, a 1995 inductee into the International Karate and Kickboxing Hall of Fame, a disabled Vietnam veteran and former Green Beret officer, and is a real cowboy with a real horse and real ranch in southern Colorado.
Award for Literary Excellence
Peter Brandvold - Fiction
Peter Brandvold has penned over 70 fast-action westerns under his own name and his penname, Frank Leslie. He is the author of the ever-popular .45-Caliber books featuring Cuno Massey as well as the Lou Prophet and Yakima Henry novels. Visit his website at www.peterbrandvold.com.
Award for Literary Excellence
T.J. Stiles - Nonfiction
T.J. Stiles is the author of The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War. His new book, Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America, will be published by Alfred A. Knopf on October 27, 2015.
Award for Literary Excellence
David Marion Wilkinson - Fiction
Credited as a “Co-Producer” on A&E/History’s 8-hour mini-series, Texas Rising, Wilkinson is also the multi-award-winning author of Not Between Brothers, The Empty Quarter, Oblivion’s Altar, One Ranger, and his latest novel, Where the Mountains Are Thieves. Wilkinson will appear with Bill Paxton, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Cynthia Addai-Robinson, H.W. Brands, and many others in a companion documentary–tentatively entitled “The True Story of Texas Rising”.
President's Award
Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy has written ten novels, spanning the Southern Gothic, western, and post-apocalyptic genres. He won the Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for The Road (2006). His 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. For All the Pretty Horses , he won both the U.S. National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. Blood Meridian was among Time magazine's list of 100 best English-language books published between 1923 and 2005 and placed joint runner-up in a poll taken in 2006 by The New York Times of the best American fiction published in the last 25 years.
2015 Awards
Award for Literary Excellence
Robert M. Utley - Nonfiction
Robert M. Utley is an American author and historian who has written sixteen books on the history of the American West. He is a former chief historian for the National Park Service. The Western History Association annually gives out the Robert M. Utley Book Award for the best book published on the military history of the frontier and western North America (including Mexico and Canada) from prehistory through the 20th century.
Award for Literary Excellence
Kat Martin - Fiction
Currently living in Missoula, Montana, Kat is the New York Times bestselling author of over fifty Historical and Contemporary Romance Suspense novels. Before she started writing in 1985, Kat was a real estate broker. During that time, she met her husband, Larry Jay Martin, author of more than twenty books, both westerns and mysteries. Kat is a graduate of the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she majored in Anthropology and also studied History.
Award for Literary Excellence
Craig Johnson - Fiction
Craig Johnson is the author of eight novels in the Walt Longmire mystery series, which has garnered popular and critical acclaim. The Cold Dish was a Dilys Award finalist and the French edition won Le Prix du Polar Nouvel Observateur/BibliObs. Death Without Company, the Wyoming State Historical Association’s Book of the Year, won France’s Le Prix 813. The Dark Horse, the fifth in the series, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year. Junkyard Dogs won the Watson Award for a mystery novel with the best sidekick, and Hell Is Empty, selected by Library Journal as the Best Mystery of the Year, was a New York Times best seller, as was As the Crow Flies. The Walt Longmire series is the basis for the hit A&E drama, Longmire, starring Robert Taylor, Lou Diamond Phillips, and Katee Sackoff. Johnson lives in Ucross, Wyoming, population twenty-five.
President's Award
Robert J. Randisi
Robert J. Randisi is the author of over 600 novels, many of them Westerns, and is the creator of the popular Gunsmith series of adult Western novels. More than 15 million copies of that series alone have sold. One of the most successful Western writers of our time, Randisi has written a book a month since 1982. All of these accomplishments made him an easy pick for this year's ReadWest President's Award.
2013 Awards
