2023 Summerlee Book Prize

Call for Submissions

The Center for History and Culture of Southeast Texas and the Upper Gulf Coast at Lamar University requests submissions for its annual Summerlee Book Prize. The Center awards two $1000 prizes in non-fiction and creative categories for the best book-length publications that significantly contribute to our understanding of Southeast Texas and the greater Gulf Coast. The Center encourages submissions that focus on our core region or positions it within broader national, hemispheric, or global contexts.  

The committee will consider books published and copyrighted between 2021 to 2023 not previously submitted to the Summerlee Book Prize. Self-published or unpublished manuscripts are not eligible. Publishers and authors may nominate their work by sending three copies by March 15, 2023 to:

Jimmy L. Bryan Jr., Director
The Center for History and Culture
Lamar University
Box 10048
Beaumont, Tx 77710

Please designate to which category the Center should assign the submission.

The non-fiction category may include but is not limited to history, journalism, environmental studies, literary and art history, material culture, social science, archaeology.

The creative category may include but is not limited to novels, poetry, short story collections, graphic novels.

Separate panels of three judges will select the award winners. The judges may withhold awards in one or both categories.

The Center will announce award winners for the non-fiction and creative writing categories in April 2023.

Awards made possible by a generous grant from
The Summerlee Foundation

Past Summerlee Book Prize Winners

2022

Creative

Ron Rozelle, Leaving the Country of Sin: A Novel (Texas Review Press, 2021).

Nonfiction

Tara A. Dudley, Building Antebellum New Orleans: Free People of Color and Their Influence (University of Texas Press, 2021).

2021

Creative

Christopher Lee Manes, Naming the Leper: Poems (LSU Press, 2020).

Nonfiction

Barrie Scardino Bradley, Improbable Metropolis: Houston’s Architectural and Urban History (University of Texas Press, 2020).

2020

Co-Winners

Cody Smith, Gulf: Poems (Texas Review Press, 2019).

Sophie White, Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press, 2019).

Honorable Mention

Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton, Newsworthy: Poems (Bloomsday, 2019).

2019

Co-Winners

Merline Pitre, Born to Serve: A History of Texas Southern University (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018).

Cameron B. Strang, Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018).

Honorable Mention

Johnnie Bernhard, How We Came to Be (Texas Review Press, 2018).

2018

Co-Winners

Gretchen Johnson, Single in Southeast Texas (Golden Antelope Press, 2017).

Ellen Riesntra and Jo Ann Stiles, The Long Shadow: The Lutcher-Stark Lumber Dynasty (Tower Books, 2016).