Each year the Center for Great Plains Studies presents a prize for the previous year's best book on the Great Plains. The Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize carries a cash award increased to $10,000. Publishers or authors may make nominations; each publisher may submit up to five titles. Only first edition, full-length, nonfiction books copyrighted in 2022 are evaluated for this year's award, which is chosen by committee.
2023 SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
2022 WINNER

Alaina E. Roberts: I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land
The winner of the 2022 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize is author Alaina E. Roberts for I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). Dr. Roberts is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh.
Dr. Roberts is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh who studies the intersection of Black and Native American life from the Civil War to the modern day. She holds a Doctorate in History from Indiana University and a Bachelor of Arts in History, with honors, from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
She writes, teaches, and presents public talks about Black and Native history in the West, family history, slavery in the Five Tribes (the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole Indian Nations), Native American enrollment politics, and Indigeneity in North America and across the globe.
"I've Been Here All the While tells the stories of the Black, Native, and white people who made Indian Territory, now known as the state of Oklahoma, their home," Roberts said. "This history is often overlooked, so it’s such an honor for my book to be recognized by the Center for Great Plains Studies, which houses important projects like Black Homesteaders, that do so much to educate the public on the diverse history of the Plains."
The Center for Great Plains Studies’ Stubbendieck book prize celebrates the most outstanding work about the Great Plains during the past year, chosen by an independent group of scholars.
Book Prize lecture: Sept. 7, 2022, 5:30 p.m., virtual and in-person at the Center for Great Plains Studies. Watch the lecture.
PAST WINNERS
- 2021 Winner
Leo Killsback
Montana State University - 2020 Winner
Pekka Hämäläinen
University of Oxford - 2019 Winner
C.J. Janovy
Kansas City, MO - 2018 Winner
Ted Genoways
Lincoln, Nebraska - 2017 Winner
Dan Flores
University of Montana Emeritus - 2016 Winner
Michel Hogue
Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario - 2015 Winner
Elizabeth Fenn
University of Colorado at Boulder - 2014 Winner
Bernard Flaman
Saskatchewan, Canada
- 2013 Winner
William E. Farr
University of Montana - 2011 Winner
James N. Leiker and Ramon Powers
Overland Park, Kansas - 2010 Winner
William Y. Chalfant
Hutchinson, Kansas - 2009 Winner
Michael Forsberg
Lincoln, Nebraska - 2008 Winner
Pekka Hämäläinen
University of California at Santa Barbara - 2007 Winner
Akim Reinhardt
Towson University - 2006 Winner
Michael L. Tate
University of Nebraska at Omaha - 2005 Winner
Louis S. Warren
University of California, Davis