2012 Lariat Award

High Plains Press – Nancy Curtis, Publisher

Western Writers of America has selected High Plains Press, to receive the 2012 Lariat Award. This special award is given to those who have achieved distinction in their support of Western Writers of America and the literature of the West.

Proving that neither location nor size affects good work, High Plains Press, which operates on a cattle ranch near Glendo, Wyoming, has won five Wrangler Awards from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum for poetry, a Willa award and several Willa finalist awards from Women Writing the West, several finalist awards in the Western Writers of America Spur Awards, and finalists in the Ben Franklin Awards competitions. Publisher Nancy Curtis has also published several winners for book awards from the Wyoming Historical Society.

Among the authors Curtis has published are Larry K. Brown, Gaydell Collier, Laurie Wagner Buyer, Lori Van Pelt, Diana Kouris, Robert Roripaugh, a past Wyoming Poet Laureate, Tom Lindmier, Mary Alice Gunderson, Peggy Simpson Curry, Candy Moulton, Charles Levendosky, Chip Carlson, W. C. Jameson, Gladys B. Beery, Linda Hasselstrom, and Jane Candia Coleman.

Curtis received the 2010 Wyoming Governor’s Arts Award for her contribution to writing. She is also the co-editor with Linda Hasselstrom and Gaydell Collier of three collections of writing by plainswomen published by Houghton Mifflin: Leaning into the Wind, Woven on the Wind, and Crazy Woman Creek.

This honor has only been bestowed six times. Previous awards have been presented to the University of Oklahoma Press, True West Magazine, Tom Doherty/Forge Books, Caxton Press, Dorchester Publishing/Leisure Books, and Luther Wilson University Press Director.