Jointly presented by the Southern Regional Council and the University of Georgia Libraries, the Lillian Smith Book Awards honor those authors who, through their outstanding writing about the American South, carry on Smith's legacy of elucidating the condition of racial and social inequity and proposing a vision of justice and human understanding.
Since 1968, the awards have been presented annually, except for 2003 when the Southern Regional Council experienced funding shortfalls. It is the South's oldest and best-known book award, and is presented in fiction and non-fiction categories.
George B. Tindall for The Emergence of the New South: 1913-1945, Louisiana State University Press.
Dan T. Carter for Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South, Louisiana State University Press.
Paul M. Gaston for The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking, Alfred A. Knopf.
Anthony Dunbar for Our Land, Too, Pantheon Books.
Robert Coles for Children of Crisis, Vol. II: Migrants, Sharecroppers, Mountaineers, and Volume III: The South Goes North, Little, Brown and Company.
Harold Martin for Ralph McGill, Reporter, Little Brown and Company.
Alice Walker for Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
C. Vann Woodward for The Strange Career of Jim Crow, Oxford University Press.
Albert Murray for Train Whistle Guitar, McGraw-Hill.
James Loewen and Charles Sallis for Mississippi: Conflict and Change, Pantheon Books.
Reynolds Price for The Surface of Earth, Atheneum.
Alex Haley for Roots, Doubleday.
Richard Kluger for Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality, Alfred A. Knopf.
Will D. Campbell for Brother to a Dragonfly, The Seabury Press.
Garrett Epps for The Shad Treatment, Putnam.
Marion Wright and Arnold Shankman for Human Rights Odyssey, Moore Publishing.
Ernest J. Gaines for In My Father's House, Alfred A. Knopf.
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall for Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching, Columbia University Press.
Cormac McCarthy for Suttree, Random House.
John Gaventa for Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley, University of Illinois Press.
Pat Conroy for The Lords of Discipline, Houghton Mifflin.
Harry S. Ashmore for Hearts and Minds: The Anatomy of Racism from Roosevelt to Reagan, McGraw-Hill.
John Ehle for The Winter People, Harper & Row.
Fred Hobson for South-Watching: Selected Essays by Gerald W. Johnson, University of North Carolina Press.
Roy Hoffman for Almost Family, Dial Press.
John Egerton for Generations: An American Family, University of Kentucky Press.
Alice Walker for In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Eudora Welty - Special Lifetime Award.
James Farmer for Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement, Arbor House.
Peter Taylor for The Old Forest and Other Stories, Dial Press.
A.G. Mojtabai for Blessed Assurance: At Home with the Bomb in Amarillo, Texas, Houghton Mifflin.
Thomas L. Johnson, and Phillip C. Dunn (ed.) for A True Likeness: The Black South of Richard Samuel Roberts, 1920–1936, Algonquin Books.
Pauli Murray for Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage, Harper & Row.
Mary Hood for And Venus is Blue: Stories, Ticknor & Fields.
Melton A. McLaurin for Separate Pasts: Growing Up White in the segregated South, University of Georgia Press.
C. Eric Lincoln for The Avenue: Clayton City, Morrow.
Melany Nielson for Even Mississippi, University of Alabama Press.
Madison Smartt Bell for Soldier's Joy, Ticknor & Fields.
Gloria Naylor for Mama Day, Ticknor & Fields.
Wayne Flynt for Poor But Proud: Alabama's Poor Whites, University of Alabama Press.
Dori Sanders for Clover: A Novel, Algonquin Books.
J.L. Chestnut, Jr., and Julia Cass for Black in Selma : The Uncommon Life of J.L. Chestnut, Jr.: Politics and Power in a Small American Town, Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Mary Ward Brown for Tongues of Flame, E.P. Dutton.
Marian Wright Edelman for The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours, Beacon Press.
Melissa Fay Greene for Praying for Sheetrock, Addison-Wesley.
Denise Giardina for The Unquiet Earth, W.W. Norton & Company.
Charles W. Eagles for Outside Agitator: Jon Daniels and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, University of North Carolina Press.
William Baldwin for The Hard To Catch Mercy, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.
Margaret Rose Gladney for How Am I To Be Heard? Letters of Lillian Smith, University of North Carolina Press.
John Gregory Brown for Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery, Houghton Mifflin Company.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. for Colored People, Alfred A. Knopf.
John Dittmer for Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi, University of Illinois Press.
Charles M. Payne for I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle, University of California Press.
Adam Fairclough for Race & Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972, University of Georgia Press.
Mary Lee Settle for Choices, Nan A. Talese/Doubleday.
Michael D'Orso for Like Judgment Day: The Ruin and Redemption of a Town Called Rosewood, Grosset/Putnam.
Constance W. Curry for Silver Rights, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.
Anthony Grooms for Trouble No More, La Questa.
John M. Barry for The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, Simon & Schuster.
Charles Frazier for Cold Mountain, Atlantic Monthly Press.
John Lewis for Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, with Michael D'Orso, Simon & Schuster.
Elizabeth Cox for Night Talk, Graywolf Press.
J. Morgan Kousser for "Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction", University of North Carolina Press.
Leroy Davis for A Clashing of the Soul: John Hope and the Dilemma of African-American Leadership and Black Higher Education in the Early Twentieth Century, University of Georgia Press.
Lawrence N. Powell for Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, The Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana, University of North Carolina Press.
Andrew M. Manis for A Fire You Can't Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham's Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, University of Alabama Press.
Michael Keith Honey for Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism and the Freedom Struggle, University of California Press.
Hal Crowther for Cathedrals of Kudzu: A Personal Landscape of the South, Louisiana State University Press.
Pam Durban for So Far Back, Picador USA Robert P. “Bob” Moses, Charles E. Cobb, Jr., Radical Equations, Beacon Press.
Natasha Trethewey for Domestic Work, Graywolf Press.
Anthony Grooms for Bombingham, Free Press.
Mark Newman for Getting Right with God: Southern Baptists and Desegregation, 1945-1995, University of Alabama Press
Keith Wailoo for Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health, University of North Carolina Press.
William H. Chafe, Raymond Gavins, and Robert Korstad editors, with Paul Ortiz, Nicole Waligora-Davis, Robert Parrish, Jennifer Ritterhouse, Keisha Roberts, Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South, The New Press.
Barbara Ransby for Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement; A Radical Democratic Vision, University of North Carolina Press.
Elizabeth R. Varon for Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, A Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy, Oxford University Press.
Frank X. Walker for Buffalo Dance, The Journey of York, The University Press of Kentucky.
Stephanie Camp for Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South, University of North Carolina Press.
Frye Gaillard for Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement that Changed America, University of Alabama Press.
Tayari Jones for The Untelling: A Novel, Time Warner Book Group.
Heather Andrea Williams for Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom, University of North Carolina Press.
W. Fitzhugh Brundage for The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Natasha Trethewey for Native Guard, Houghton Mifflin Co.
Matthew D. Lassiter for The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics In the Sunbelt South Princeton University Press.
Joseph Crespino for In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution Princeton University Press.
Wesley C. Hogan for Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC's Dream for a New America University of North Carolina Press.
Areila J. Gross for What Blood Won't Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America Harvard University Press.
Bob Zellner with Constance W. Curry for The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement NewSouth Books, Inc.
Amy Louise Wood, for Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940, University of North Carolina Press
Charles W. Eagles, for The Price of Defiance: James Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss, University of North Carolina Press
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