1989 Merrill Gilfillan, Magpie Rising (Pruett Publishing Company)
1990 Amy Wilentz, The Rainy Season (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)
1991 Gerald Marzorati, A Painter of Darkness: Leon Golub and Our Times (Viking)
1992 Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land (Knopf)
1993 David Campbell, The Crystal Desert: Summers in Antarctica (Houghton Mifflin)
1994 Michael Kelly, Martyr’s Day: Chronicle of a Small War (Random House)
1995 Louise Gluck, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry (Ecco)
1996 Mary Karr, The Liars’ Club (Viking)
1997 Mark Doty, Heaven’s Coast (HarperCollins)
1998 Serge Schmemann, Echoes of a Native Land (Knopf)
1999 Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
2000 Eileen Welsome, The Plutonium Files (Dial)
2001 Charles Siefe, Zero (Viking)
2002 Nina Bernstein, The Lost Children of Wilder (Pantheon)
2003 Daniel Wilkinson, Silence on the Mountain (Houghton)
2004 Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
2005 Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (W.W. Norton & Company)
2006 Amy Butler Greenfield, A Perfect Red (Harpercollins) and Marjorie Williams, The Woman at the Washington Zoo: Writing on Politics, Family, and Fate (Public Affairs)