On Saturday, November 18th, 2023, SIU Press was awarded the Wendy Allen Award for Institutional Excellence from the Lincoln Forum!
The award is given each year to an organization or institution that “does exceptional work helping the public learn about Lincoln or the Civil War.” Past winners include the Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, The Lincoln Museum, and the Gettysburg Foundation. The award was given in honor of our Concise Lincoln Library series of books. In addition, the series editors were jointly awarded the Harold Holzer Lincoln Forum Book Prize for their work as co-editors of the series!
Jonathan White, Vice Chair of the Lincoln Forum, presented the awards. Sylvia Frank Rodrigue, executive editor for SIU Press and one of the CLL series editors, accepted the awards.
Jonathan read the following quote from Dan Weinberg, proprietor of the Abraham Lincoln Bookshop in Chicago, during his remarks: “The Concise Lincoln Library is a unique contribution to the study of Abraham Lincoln and his impact on American history. These pithy insights into important topics of Lincoln’s life and times, each written by a noted Lincoln scholar, has allowed the general public—young as well as old—to access and understand perhaps the most important era in America[’s] past. Scholarly, yet approachable, the entire set is essential to any shelf devoted to those years. It will especially have a lasting effect for quickly introducing future generations to our shared past with basic knowledge in a lively and readable form.”
The Wendy Allen Award is named after Wendy Allen, a renowned Lincoln artist. When SIU Press first conceived of the CLL series, we commissioned Wendy Allen to create a piece of original Lincoln art for the covers of the books. We adjust the colors for each new title, but they are all based on her original artwork.