The Western History Association announces the Owens Book Award given annually for the best book on the history of the Pacific West, including Alaska, Hawaii, Western Canada, and the U.S. Pacific territories. The Award is $500 to the author and a certificate to the publisher. The award is supported by the Sally and Ken Owens Trust and administered by the Western History Association.
Publishers may submit more than one title each year. All submissions must have a 2025 copyright date. While the formal process requires presses/journals to submit the work of their authors, the WHA strongly recommends that authors check with the award committee chair a week before the deadline to see if they received a copy of their work. Presses should submit nominations and a copy of the book to each member of the award committee listed below.
-2026 Awards Cycle opens January 15, 2026
-2026 Award Submission (Postmark) Deadline: March 15, 2026
The WHA office sends notifications to selected award recipients at the end of August.
2025 | William Gow, Performing Chinatown: Hollywood, Tourism, and the Making of a Chinese American Community (Stanford University Press, 2024)
2024 | Adrian De Leon, Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America (University of North Carolina Press, 2023)
2023 | Adria L. Imada, An Archive of Skin, An Archive of Kin: Disability and Life-Making during Medical Incarceration (University of California Press, 2022)
2022 | Juliana Hu Pegues, Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska's Indigenous and Asian Entanglements(University of North Carolina Press, 2021)
2021 | Aaron Goings, The Port of Missing Men: Billy Gohl, Labor, and Brutal Times in the Pacific Northwest(University of Washington Press, 2020)
2020 | Genevieve Carpio, Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race (University of California Press, 2019)
2019 | Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Harvard University, 2018)
2018 | Joy Schulz for Hawaiian By Birth: Missionary Children, Bicultural Identity, and U.S. Colonialism in the Pacific (University of Nebraska Press, 2017)
2017 | John W. Troutman for Kīkā Kila: How the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Changed the Sound of Modern Music (University of South Carolina Press, 2016)
2016 | Joshua Reid for The Sea is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs (Yale University Press, 2015)
2014 | David Igler for The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (Oxford University Press, 2013).
BACKGROUND:
SALLY AND KEN OWENS
Life-long residents of the Pacific Northwest, Sally and Ken Owens met and married while attending Lewis and Clark College. Subsequently they moved to Minneapolis, where in 1959 Ken completed his Ph.D. in western history at the University of Minnesota. They then moved to DeKalb, where he taught at Northern Illinois University. Following the birth of their two daughters, Sally began grad school at NIU in microbiology. In 1968 Ken took a position at California State University, Sacramento. Sally finished her microbiology Ph.D. at University of California, Davis, in 1974, and she too then became a member of the CSUS faculty. They remained at CSUS until retirement, Sally in 1996 and Ken in 2000.
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