Preston Lewis

Growing up in West Texas and loving history, Spur Award-winning author Preston Lewis naturally gravitated to stories of the Old West and religiously read his father’s copies of True West and Frontier Times. Today he is the author of more than 30 western, juvenile and historical novels as well as numerous articles, short stories and book reviews on the American frontier.

Preston Lewis began his writing career with traditional westerns and expanded it to include historical novels, comic westerns and young adult novels. His publishers have included Bantam, HarperCollins, Pinnacle, Eakin Press and Wolfpack Publishing. Blood of Texas, his historical novel on the Texas Revolution, received Western Writers of America’s Spur Award for best western. His True West article “Bluster’s Last Stand” also won a Spur Award. Lewis’s other short works have appeared in publications as varied as Louis L’Amour Western Magazine, Old West, Persimmon Hill and Dallas Morning News.

He is the author of the well-received Memoirs of H.H. Lomax, a comic western series, beginning with The Demise of Billy the Kid. The second and third books in the series—The Redemption of Jesse James and Mix-Up at the O.K. Corral—were Spur Finalists. Bluster’s Last Stand, the fourth book in the Lomax series, won the 2018 Will Rogers Medallion Award for written western humor. His western caper, The Fleecing of Fort Griffin, won his third Elmer Kelton Award from the West Texas Historical Association for best creative work on West Texas.

Preston Lewis began his professional career working for four Texas daily newspapers before moving into higher education communications and marketing at Texas Tech University and later Angelo State University, where he retired in 2014. Lewis holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism from Baylor and Ohio State respectively and another master’s in American history from Angelo State.

Preston Lewis is a past president of WWA and WTHA, which in 2016 named him a fellow. He has served on the boards of the Ranching Heritage Association and the Book Club of Texas. He and his wife Harriet live in San Angelo, Texas.