The Lariat Award was created in 2006 and recognizes a company or individual who has shown exceptional support for WWA and for the literature of the American West.

• 2024 International Western Music Association
• 2023 Six-Gun Justice Podcast
• 2022 BPI
• 2021 Denver Public Library, Western History Collections
• 2020 Wolfpack Publishing
• 2019 Bobby Daniels
• 2018 The Arthur H. Clark Company
• 2017 University of Nebraska Press
• 2016 TwoDot
• 2015 Walmart and ANConnect, Booksellers
• 2014 Emil Franzi, radio host of Voices of the West
• 2013 Five Star Publishing, publisher of historical and Western novels
• 2012 Nancy Curtis/High Plains Press, publisher of many award winning books about Wyoming and the West
• 2011 Luther Wilson, former director of University of New Mexico Press
• 2010 Dorchester Publishing, publisher of multiple western titles under the Leisure Books imprint
• 2009 University of Oklahoma Press, distinguished publisher of Western fiction and nonfiction and recipient of numerous Spur Awards, and the first university press established in the Southwest
• 2008 True West magazine, Western history magazine founded in 1953, revamped and reimagined by historian/artist Bob Boze Bell when he took it over in the late 1990s
• 2007 The first Lariat Award to an individual was presented to Tom Doherty of Tor-Forge Publishing. His firm has produced three WWA anthologies and generated fourteen Spur Awards through 2006
• 2006 The first Lariat Award was presented to the Caxton Publishing, one of the oldest Western publishers and a long-time champion of WWA