The Willie Lee Rose Prize is awarded annually for the best book in Southern history authored by a woman. 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 Rose Prize, mail a copy of the publication to each of the following committee members, postmarked no later than May 15, 2024.

Sarah Silkey, Chair
SAWH Willie Lee Rose Prize Committee
Lycoming College, Department of History
1 College Place
Williamsport, PA 17701

Jenifer Barclay
University at Buffalo
Department of History
546 Park Hall
Buffalo, NY 14260-4130

Lisa Francavilla
Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Services
Thomas Jefferson Foundation Inc.
P.O. Box 316
Charlottesville, VA 22902

Past Winners

2023 Viola Franziska Müller. Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South. University of North Carolina Press.

2022 Jill Ogline Titus. Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politcs, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town. University of North Carolina Press.

2020 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall. Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America. W.W. Norton.

2020 Sarah Milov. The Cigarette: A Political History. Harvard University Press.

2019 Diane Miller Somerville. Aberation of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War-Era South. University of North Carolina Press.

2018 Tera W. Hunter. Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century. Harvard University Press.

2017 Sarah Haley. No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity. University of North Carolina Press.

2017 Greta De Jong. You Can’t Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice After the Civil Rights Movement. University of North Carolina Press.

2016 Elaine Frantz Parsons. Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan During Reconstruction. University of North Carolina Press.

2015 Blain Roberts. Pageants, Parlors, & Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South. University of North Carolina Press

2014 Carole Emberton. Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the South after the Civil War. University of Chicago Press.

2013 Stacy Braukman. Communists and Perverts Under the Palms: The Johns Committee in Florida, 1956-1965. University Press of Florida.

2012 Rose Stremlau. Sustaining the Cherokee Family: Kinship and the Allotment of an Indigenous Nation. University of North Carolina Press.

2011 Stephanie McCurry. Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South. Harvard University Press.