The Julia Cherry Spruill Prize is awarded annually for the best book in southern women’s history, broadly construed. Only monographs with a copyright date of 2023 are eligible for the award in 2024. Entries must be written in English, but the competition is open to works published outside the U.S., and presses may submit as many eligible books as they choose.
To nominate a book for the Spruill Prize, please mail a copy of the publication to each committee member, postmarked no later than May 31, 2024.
Felicity Turner, Chair
5501 Abercorn St., Suite D-170
Savannah, GA 31405-6911
Katie Hemphill
César E. Chávez Building, Room 415
1110 James E. Rogers Way
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721
Pippa Holloway
2510 Semmes Ave.
Richmond, VA 23225
Past Winners
2023 Christina Green. Free Joan Little: The Politics of Race, Sexual Violence, and Imprisonment. University of North Carolina Press
2022 Deanna M. Gillespie. The Citizenship Education Program and Black Women’s Political Culture. University Press of Florida.
2020 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall. Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America. National Geographic Books.
2020 Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers. They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. Yale University Press.
2019 Rebecca Tuuri. Strategic Sisterhood: The National Council of Negro Women in the Black Freedom Struggle. University of North Carolina Press.
2018 Sasha Turner. Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica. University of Pennsylvania Press.
2017 Sarah Haley. No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity. University of North Carolina Press.
2016 LaKisha Michelle Simmons. Crescent City Girls: The Lives of Young Black Women in Segregated New Orleans. University of North Carolina Press.
2015 Debbie Z. Harwell. Wednesdays in Mississippi: Proper Ladies Working for Radical Change, Freedom Summer 1964. University Press of Mississippi.
2014 Katy Simpson Smith. We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750-1835. Louisiana State University Press.
2013 Cynthia Kierner. Martha Jefferson Randolph, Daughter of Monticello: Her Life and Times. University of North Carolina Press.
2012 Amrita Chakrabarti Myers. Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston. University of North Carolina Press.
2011 Danielle McGuire. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance – A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. Knopf Doubleday Publishing.
2010 Katherine Mellen Charron. Freedom’s Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark. University of North Carolina Press.
2007 Lorraine G. Schuyler. The Weight of their Votes: Southern Women and Political Leverage in the 1920s. University of North Carolina Press.