Award-Winning Books
Each year the Wyoming Historical Society’s awards recognize books that add to the record of Wyoming’s past. These are the titles that have won, from the Society’s own press and from publishers across the region.
To put a book forward for this year’s awards, see Submit Nomination. Every year’s full list of winners is in Past Winners.

From Behind Barbed Wire to Washington: The Remarkable Friendship of Norman Mineta and Alan Simpson
Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation
Published July 2024
2025 · 1st Place, Self-Published
A graphic novel about Norman Mineta and Alan Simpson, who met as Boy Scouts at the Heart Mountain camp in 1943 and went on to serve in Congress and in presidential cabinets. Illustrated by Marie Okuma Johnston.

A Sometimes Paradise: Reflections on Life in a Wyoming Ranch Family
Sandra Jonas Publishing House
Published May 2024
2025 · 1st Place, Memoir
Miller’s memoir of growing up on his family’s Wyoming ranch: ice storms and droughts, adventures and misadventures, and the lessons the work taught him as a boy and a young man.

Heart Mountain Chronicles: The History of a Japanese Relocation Center
WordsWorth Publishing
Published May 2024
2025 · 1st Place, Reference Work on a Wyoming Subject or Locale
A history of the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in northwest Wyoming, one of ten camps built in 1942 to hold Japanese Americans forced from the West Coast. Put up in sixty days, it briefly became the third-largest city in the state, and the book follows it from construction to the departure of its last residents in November 1945.

Buffalo Bill and the Mormons
Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press
Published March 2024
2025 · 1st Place, Biographies and Autobiographies
Rogers follows the long and shifting relationship between William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody and the Latter-day Saints, from Cody’s early years in the West to the turn of the century, when he recruited Mormon settlers to build the irrigation works and farms around his namesake town of Cody, Wyoming.

Murder on the Plains: The Killing of “Diamond L Slim” Clifton
2025 · 2nd Place, Non-Fiction
Three homesteaders, a cowboy called Slim and his neighbours Mr. and Mrs. Church, took up ranches along Porcupine Creek in western Weston County. Their arrival led to their deaths, and to the most infamous murders the county has recorded.