The Society for Textual Scholarship awards the Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize for an outstanding essay in textual studies substantially published for the first time during the two years prior to the Society's biennial conference. Essays published in periodicals, critical books, and collections by diverse hands are eligible for the Bowers Prize. If part of a longer work, the significance of the essay must be independent of that context. The Prize, which includes an honorarium, is presented at the biennial conference.

The 2003 Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize was awarded to Professor Matthew G. Kirschenbaum for "Editing the Interface: Textual Studies and First Generation Electronic Objects," TEXT 14 (2002): 15-51. The Prize Committee consisted of Marta L. Werner, Chair, Nicholas Frankel, and Trevor Howard-Hill.

The 2005 Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize was awarded to Professor Randall McLeod for his essay "Gerard Hopkins and The Shapes of His Sonnets," which appeared in Voice Text Hypertext: Emerging Practices in Textual Studies, edited by Raimonda Modiano, Leroy F. Searle, and Peter Shillingsburg (Seattle: U of Washington Press, 2004). The 2005 Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize Committee consisted of Nicholas Frankel, Chair, Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, and Marta L. Werner.

The 2007 Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize was awarded to Professor Lawrence Rainey for his essay, "With Automatic Hand: Writing the Waste Land," from his book Revisiting the Waste Land (Yale, 2005). The 2007 Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize Committee consisted of Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Chair, Marta L. Werner, and Randall McLeod.

For news about the Society's efforts to establish a book prize in memory of Richard J. Finneran, please see the News and Updates page.