Booker Worthen Literary Prize

aka: Worthen Prize

The Booker Worthen Literary Prize is awarded each year to the best work, fiction or non-fiction, by an author living in Arkansas. With a stipend of $2,000, it is one of the state’s most lucrative and prestigious literary prizes.

The Booker Worthen Literary Prize was established in 1999 in the memory of William Booker Worthen, who was a member of the Central Arkansas Library System (CALS) Board of Trustees for twenty-two years, as well as part of the Worthen Bank empire. The award is funded in part by interest from an endowment for the award donated by the Worthen family.

The Worthen Prize was awarded in a joint program with the Porter Fund Literary Prize until 2021. This generally occurred in October, but, in 2008, the year that CALS took over responsibility of what is now the Six Bridges Book Festival, the reception was moved to coincide with the festival, although it was not an official part of the festival. In 2012, however, the award ceremony returned to October. The winning book is selected by the Worthen Prize Committee. Originally, to qualify, authors had live in the CALS service area, which included over thirty counties in central Arkansas with which the library system had a lending agreement (called the “Gateway Program”). However, in 2020, after CALS withdrew from the Gateway Program, the award was expanded to cover the entire state of Arkansas.

There is a three-year period of eligibility based on a book’s copyright year. Five authors—Mara Leveritt, Kevin Brockmeier, Grif Stockley, S. Charles Bolton, and Kenneth C. Barnes—have won the award twice.

Year	Book	Author
1999	Arkansas, 1800–1860: Remote and Restless	S. Charles Bolton
2000	The Boys on the Tracks	Mara Leveritt
2001	The Rumble of a Distant Drum: The Quapaws and Old World Newcomers, 1673–1804.	Morris S. Arnold
2002	Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919	Grif Stockley
2003	Devil’s Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three	Mara Leveritt
2004	The Truth about Celia	Kevin Brockmeier
2005	Communities of Kinship: Antebellum Families and the Settlement of the Cotton Frontier	Carolyn Earle Billingsley
2006	Promises Kept	Sidney S. McMath
2007	A Brief History of the Dead	Kevin Brockmeier
2008	Turn away Thy Son: Little Rock, the Crisis that Shocked the Nation	Elizabeth Jacoway
2009	The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey	Trenton Lee Stewart
2010	Ruled by Race: Black/White Relations in Arkansas from Slavery to the Present	Grif Stockley
2011	The Broken Vase	Phillip H. McMath and Emily Matson Lewis
2012	The Thousand-Year Flood: The Ohio-Mississippi Disaster of 1937	David Welky
2013	Civil War Arkansas, 1863: The Battle for a State	Mark K. Christ
2014	Fiat Flux: The Writings of Wilson R. Bachelor, Nineteenth-Century Country Doctor and Philosopher	William D. Lindsey
2015	Racial Cleansing in Arkansas, 1883–1924: Politics, Land, Labor, and Criminality	Guy Lancaster
2016	We Wanna Boogie: The Rockabilly Roots of Sonny Burgess and the Pacers	Marvin Schwartz
2017	Anti-Catholicism in Arkansas: How Politicians, the Press, the Klan, and Religious Leaders Imagined an Enemy	Kenneth C. Barnes
2018	Dardanelle and the Bottoms: Environment, Agriculture, and Economy in an Arkansas River Community, 1819–1970	Mildred Diane Gleason
2019	Just and Righteous Causes: Rabbi Ira Sanders and the Fight for Racial and Social Justice in Arkansas, 1926–1963	James L. Moses
2020	Fugitivism: Escaping Slavery in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 1820–1860	S. Charles Bolton
2021	Das Arkansas Echo: A Year in the Life of Germans in the Nineteenth-Century South	Kathleen Condray
2022	The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Arkansas: How Protestant White Nationalism Came to Rule a State	Kenneth C. Barnes
2023	Shared Secrets: The Queer World of Newbery Medalist Charles J. Finger	Elizabeth Findley Shores