The Laramie Book Awards recognize emerging new talent and outstanding works in the Americana and Westerns fiction genre.  The Laramie Book Awards is a division of the Chanticleer International Book Awards (The CIBAs).

Chanticleer Book Reviews is looking for the best books featuring Americana themes, First Nation stories, early North American History, cowboys & cowgirls in the Wild West, pioneering, and Civil War, and we will put them to the test and choose the best among them.

These titles have moved forward in the judging rounds from all 2023 Laramie Americana entries to the 2023 Laramie Book Awards LONG LIST. Entries below are now in competition for the 2023 Laramie Short List. The Short Listers will compete for the Semi-Finalists positions. FINALISTS will be selected from the Semi-Finalists. The First Place Category Winners, along with the CIBA Division Grand Prize winners, will be selected from the 25 CIBA divisions’ Finalists.

We will announce the 1st Place Category winners and Grand Prize Division Winners at the CIBAs Banquet and Ceremony on Saturday, April 20th, 2024 at the luxurious Hotel Bellwether in Bellingham, Wash. sponsored by the 2024 Chanticleer Authors Conference. 

These titles are in the running for the SHORT LIST of the 2023 Laramie Book Awards novel competition for Americana Fiction!

Join us in cheering on the following authors and their works!

• Leah Angstman – The Only Way to Cheat a Hangman
• Heidi M. Thomas – Rescue Ranch Rising
• Barbara Salvatore – The Trail to Niobrara
• Barbara Toomer – Season of Our Reckoning
• Deborah Hufford – Blood to Rubies
• George T. Arnold – The Heart Beneath the Badge
• Kimberly Burns – The Redemption of Mattie Silks
• Leslie K Simmons – Red Clay, Running Waters
• E. Alan Fleischauer – Chip Heller Man of Valor
• Loretta Miles Tollefson – There Will Be Consequences
• Donna E. Lane – This Hallowed Ground
• Susan Rounds – The Winds of Autumn: A Marquette Legacy Epic Romance
• Martha Engber – The Falcon, the Wolf, and the Hummingbird
• James Holland – Vigilante Love Song: Alice Roosevelt and The White House Gunfighters
• Leslie K Simmons – Red Clay, Running Waters
• Myra Hargrave McIlvain – The Knotted Ring
• K.S. JONES – Tastefully Texas
• Venetia Hobson Lewis – Changing Woman
• T.K. Conklin – Promise of Spring
• Steven Mayfield – The Penny Mansions
• Joan Koster – That Dickinson Girl: A Novel of the Civil War
• Thomas Goodman – The Last Man: A Novel of the 1927 Santa Claus Bank Robbery
• J. Stanion – My Place Among Them
• Shanna Hatfield – Love on Target
• JR Holland – Alice Roosevelt and the White House Gunfighters
• John Hansen – Grays Lake
• John W. Jarrett – The Dark Prairie
• Michael L. Ross – Across the Great Divide: Book 3 The Founding
• Julia Brewer Daily – The Fifth Daughter of Thorn Ranch
• David Calloway – If Someday Comes
• K. S. JONES – Change of Fortune
• Elizabeth Woolsey – The Travels of Dr. Rebecca Harper A Matter of Time
• Lloyd Mullins – A Rare and Dangerous Beast
• T. M. Brown – The Last Laird of Sapelo
• Sophia Alexander – Homespun
• Daniel Greene – Northern Dawn (Northern Wolf Series Book 4)

Good luck to all as your works move on to the next rounds of judging.

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Good luck to all as your works move on the next rounds of judging.

The Grand Prize Winner for the CIBA 2022 LARAMIE Awards is:

Guarded Hearts 

by T.K. Conklin

Click here to see the 2022 Laramie Book Award Winners for Americana Fiction.

The 2024 Laramie Awards are now open! Click here for more information!

For our other Historical Fiction Awards, please see the following:

• The Chaucer Awards for Pre-1750s Early Historical Fiction 
• The Goethe Awards for Post-1750s Late Historical Fiction 
• The Hemingway Awards for 20th Century Wartime Fiction 

Winners will be announced at the 2023 CIBA Awards Ceremony that is sponsored by the 2024 Chanticleer Authors Conference.

CAC24 –April 18-21, 2024! Register Today!

Seating is Limited. The esteemed WRITER Magazine (founded in 1887)  has repeatedly recognized the Chanticleer Authors Conference as one of the best conferences to attend and participate in for North America.

Join us for our 11th annual conference and discover why!

The Laramie Awards are calling

Submit your Americana, Western or Civil War Novels to the CIBAs!

***Tell your story today***

You have until September 30th to share your Story with us and enter the 2023 CIBAs!

Charles M. Russell painted the cowboy seen on Chanticleer’s very own Laramie contest badge. It is one of many such paintings he did that encompassed the Old American Wild West. An advocate for the Native Americans, Charles M. Russell also helped establish a reservation in Montana for the Chippewa people.

Lets take a look at the Grand Prize Winners of the Laramie Awards!

Tom Sawyer Returns
By E.E. Burke
Laramie Grand Prize

Tom Sawyer Returns is the second book in The New Adventures series by author E.E. Burke.

Readers join a now grown up and far more independent Becky Thatcher as she maneuvers her complicated life in Civil War era Mississippi. Tom has long since left, and Becky is engaged to Union Captain Alfred Temple, who offers her all the safety and security she needs in such uncertain times. But does she love him? Actually love him?

Becky soon discovers that her heart may have other plans.

Read More Here

Trouble The Water
By Rebecca Dwight Bruff
Overall Grand Prize Winner

Robert Smalls’ life should have been one for the history books.

Smalls was born a slave in Beaufort, South Carolina, in 1839. When the first shots of the Civil War were fired upon Fort Sumter, Smalls was an experienced helmsman aboard a small cargo ship plying the coastal waters of South Carolina and the neighboring states. Once the war broke out, he found himself working to support a cause that kept him, his wife, and their children locked in chattel slavery.

But in a daring escapade that fell somewhere between a raid and a rescue, Smalls planned, with the help of his fellow crew members (also slaves) aboard the CSS Planter, to abscond with the ship, its cargo of munitions taken from Fort Sumter, and bring their families. The plan was to sail the ship as though its white officers were still on board, pretending to be carrying out their orders—at least until the ship was out of the reach of Fort Sumter’s guns.

Read More Here

Seven Aprils
By Eileen Charbonneau
Laramie Grand Prize

Disguised gender identities, warfare, and thwarted romance all play a role in this many-layered novel, Seven Aprils, by award-winning fiction author Eileen Charbonneau.

When Tess Barton, a hardscrabble farm girl, saves the life of a man attacked by a panther, she and he little realize how fated this encounter will prove. Ryder Cole, the man she saved, moves on, pursuing a medical career just as the United States seems destined for war. Intrepid Tess will move on, too, when she learns that her widower father sells her in matrimony to an old, brutish shopkeeper. A wise crone cuts Tess’s hair and garbs her in men’s attire. Reborn as Tom Boyde, who will soon, strangely, meet up with Ryder and become one of his “men,” conscripted into Lincoln’s armies. Tess/Tom shows promise as a medical assistant with some undeniable cooking skills, and together with two other conscripts, they make the team in the Union’s army hospital units.

Read More Here

Blood Moon A Captives Tale
By Ruth Hull Chatlien
Laramie Grand Prize

Ruth Hull Chatlien’s historical novel Blood Moon: A Captive’s Tale shines a light on two worlds trying to coexist in the 1860s Minnesota, that of Westward Expansion and white settlers, and that of the complex network of Sioux tribes dealing with starvation and disease. We follow her protagonist, Mrs. Sarah Wakefield, as she is thrust unwillingly into the midst of the Indian Wars.

Based loosely on the life of real captive, Sarah Wakefield, Chatlien explores both sides of this conflict, through the eyes of our terrified hero, who does what she must to save her life and the lives of her two small children. The first-person narrative in present tense places us in the thick of Wakefield’s narrow escapes, and the presence of the constant threats to her and her children.

Read More Here

 

Reviews for the 2022 Laramie Awards are to come, but you can see the full list of winners here!

Now that you’re set on your next reads, what are you waiting for? The only way to join this amazing list of Laramie Winners is to submit today!

Those who submit and advance will have the chance to win the Overall Grand Prize of the CIBAs and $1000!

Are you a Chanticleer Author who has some good news to share? Let us know! We’re always looking for a reason to crow about Chanticleerians! Reach out with your news to info@ChantiReviews.com