2011 Patrick D. Smith Award

“The trouble with panthers is they can’t change. With the whole world changin round it, old panther got no choice but to go on bein a panther. It can’t reason like you and me -- can’t decide to earn its livin a little differently.”

Central Florida, November 2004. Upon hearing this admonition from his dying grandfather, young cowman, Bodie Rawlerson, doesn’t hesitate to promise the old man that he won’t be like the panther. Though he hates change, fears it more than anything else, he vows to do whatever necessary to carry on the family legacy of raising cattle on the land he so dearly loves. But unbeknownst to Bodie, forces are already in motion to render his promise impossible to keep. Within days of his grandfather’s passing, these forces of human (and inhuman) nature will convince him that nothing lasts forever, that change is life’s only certainty -- that time and chance do indeed rule us all.

"The Way Hit Wuz" is a novel about Florida's history similiar to Patrick Smith's book "A Land Remembered". Recently reprinted 2010 with new cover. 

As a Mizell family descendant who married and had children with a Barber, author Mary Ida Bass Barber Shearhart has a personal interest in the infamous Barber-Mizell Family Feud. Florida’s Frontier: The Way Hit Wuz is written as a compelling, action-filled novel set between 1841 and 1870, but is firmly based in historical fact. In addition to offering descriptions of pioneer life in Florida from running cattle, to making soap, to cane grinding, the author provides insight about the Spanish colonization of Florida, the Seminole Indian Wars, the Civil War, and other topics

2010 Patrick D. Smith Award Winner

More than eighty years before Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings published The Yearling, Cyrus Parkhurst Condit wrote this coming-of-age novel about a teenage boy in Florida who learns to hunt, builds a fence, and takes a fawn as a pet. Undiscovered and unpublished until now, this engaging story is historically significant as one of the first Florida novels ever written. Fascinating historical and literary context is provided by the editors.

Florida Boy is the prequel to the award winning novel The Trouble With Panthers by William Culyer Hall. The Rawlerson family first settlesin south central Florida in the late nineteenth century. Pioneer life is very difficult but the family perseveres in this gripping story.