2023 Book Prize Winners

The Leopard Is Loose, a stunning look at America in the 1950s, movingly portrays a boy’s struggle to find his place in the world. When the news breaks that a leopard has escaped from the Oklahoma City zoo, the men of the city take up arms and search for the big cat. Suddenly the playthings and fears of the boy's childhood begin to give way to real terrors—threats of battle fatigue, racial injustice, and the dangerous jungle animal itself. It is a gorgeous tale of historical fiction, mesmerizing right up to the heartbreaking final sentence.  

More Than You'll Ever Know is a book with two separate but interrelated stories about love, about women’s roles and desires, and about family. A sprawling, stunning, twisting triumph, by turns heart-pounding and heart-wrenching, this is a story of marriage and murder. With hypnotic, shimmering prose set within a masterly plot, Guiterrez has crafted an explosive modern classic where Texas, Laredo, and Austin are vividly evoked.

The noted Texas writer Ben Fountain writes that Nobody's Pilgrims “gives us a fresh take not only on the great American road trip, but on the American Dream itself in all its glorious and increasingly fragile promise.” He is joined by Elizabeth Crook, who writes: “Eloquent, bold, and terrifying, Nobody’s Pilgrims is a new look at the ancient themes of innocence pursued by evil, and of the young finding their way through a chaotic and uncertain world.”

Sam W. Haynes’s Unsettled Land tells the story of the Texas Revolution and the founding of the Republic of Texas. It’s a familiar story, but Haynes tells it in a startlingly unfamiliar way. It isn’t the story of heroic figures like Sam Houston, David Crockett, and William Barret Travis freeing Texas from Mexican oppression. No. It’s the story of three decades in which the ordinary people of Texas—white Americans, Mexicans, American Indians, and those of African descent—had their lives upended by revolution. It’s the soft underbelly of Texas history, the part in which the new Lone Star Republic sought to expel Indians, marginalize Mexicans, and tighten its grip on enslaved people. It’s the story of how the nonwhite people of Texas were either driven out or subordinated. The revelatory narrative is told coolly and eloquently, with gripping detail, and without tendentious polemics. It’s a model of historical writing, and altogether it’s a tour de force.

Lewis Fisher’s Brackenridge is a rare piece of local history covering 12,000 years, but the primary focus is on the past 200. The prose is impeccable, the photography breathtaking, and the pages exceptionally well produced. Rarely does the Nonfiction Committee honor a municipal history, much less the history of one public park within a municipality. But Brackenridge is a spectacular book, and we commend it to everyone with an interest in San Antonio and everyone with an interest in first-rate bookmaking.

Rebecca Aronson’s Anchor is a collection of interwoven poems about grief and loss illuminated by love. A father’s impending death and a mother’s decline into dementia are dark experiences transformed by caring attention and by the capacity of poetry to condense experience while expanding perception. Threaded throughout these glimpses of inevitable decline and mortality are surprises—letters addressed to gravity, humor, line breaks that lead from dark to light: “We are dying / of laughter, and the light is fading, and the birds have started up . . . .”