The SLSA Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize

Updated August 2026

The Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize is awarded to the best academic book on literature, science, and the arts published in the prior year by an SLSA member.

Established in the fall of 2006 in memory of Michelle Kendrick of Washington State University-Vancouver, an energetic, well-loved scholar of literature and science and a long-time member of SLSA, the Kendrick Prize is open to any book of original scholarship on literature, science, and the arts published in the covered period. The winner will be presented with a US check for $250.00 when the prize is announced at the annual SLSA conference.

Thanks are owed to Bob Markley and Rob Mitchell and all those who have judged entries for the prize since 2006. To accord judges sufficient time, the competition will in the coming year be based on chronological year of publication.

To submit a book published any time from January to December 2026 as an entry to the 2027 Kendrick Prize competition, you (or your publisher) should by January 5, 2027, email a pdf of your published book to kendrickbookprize@gmail.com. Banu Subramaniam, (bs108@wellesley.edu) will serve as the coordinating Kendrick Book Prize Judge and will notify finalists when and to whom they can send three print copies of their books.

Donations for the Kendrick Prize (checks made out to SLSA, with Kendrick Prize in memo) can be sent to

Carol Colatrella
SLSA Executive Director
580 Cresthill Ave.
Atlanta GA 30306

The winner of the 2025 Kendrick Book Prize will be announced during the SLSA@4S meeting in Toronto, and the winner of the 2026 prize will be announced during the SLSA conference in Washington DC.

• Sara Grossman, Immeasurable Weather: Meteorological Data and Settler Colonialism from 1820 to Hurricane Sandy.  Duke University Press, 2023. (2024)
• Christina Gerhardt, Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean. University of California Press, 2023. (2023, calendar year)
• Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell, The Smartness Mandate (MIT Press), 2023. (2023, conference-to-conference)
  • Honorable Mention: Kevis Goodman, Pathologies of Motion: Historical Thinking in Medicine, Aesthetics and Poetics (Yale UP)
• Tobias Menely, Climate and the Making of Worlds: Toward a Geohistorical Poetics (University of Chicago Press), 2022
  • Honorable Mention: Michael Black, Transparent Designs: Personal Computing and the Politics of User-Friendliness (Johns Hopkins University Press)
  • Honorable Mention: Alan Stoekl, The Three Sustainabilities: Energy, Economy, Time (University of Minnesota Press)
  • Honorable Mention: Heather Davis, Plastic Matter (Duke University Press)
  • Bob Markley coordinated judging the Kendrick book prize
• Banu Subramaniam, Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism (University of Washington Press), 2020
• Arielle Saiber, Measured Words: Computation and Writing in Renaissance Italy (University of Toronto Press), 2019
• Julian Yates, Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast: A Multispecies Impression (University of Minnesota Press), 2017
• Stefan Helmreich, Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond, 2016
• Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World, 2015
• Robert Mitchell, Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature, 2014
• Catherine Belling, A Condition of Doubt: The Meaning of Hypochrondria, 2013
• Susan McHugh, Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines, 2012
• Susan Squier, Poultry Science, Chicken Culture: A Partial Alphabet, 2011
• Laura Dassow Walls, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America, 2010
• Stefan Andriopoulos, Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema, 2009
• Ralph O’Connor, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 2008
• Barbara Maria Stafford, Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images, 2007