February 5, 2026 — The Friends of the TCU Library, in partnership with TCU Press, announced that professor and author Holly M. Karibo has been selected as the 2026 TCU Texas Book Award winner. Karibo will be honored at the Texas Book Award Dinner on April 14, 2026. The Texas Book Award is presented biennially to recognize the best book published about Texas. Karibo received the award for her book, Rehab on the Range: A History of Addiction and Incarceration in the American West, published in November 2024 by University of Texas Press.
A highly acclaimed examination of the federal Narcotic Farm in Fort Worth—the first federally funded drug treatment center west of the Mississippi—Rehab on the Range is the first in-depth history of the Fort Worth Narcotic Farm and its impacts on the American West. Designed to blend psychiatric treatment, physical rehabilitation, and vocational training, the Narcotic Farm, its proponents argued, would transform American treatment policies for the better. The reality was decidedly more complicated. The book has been praised for providing crucial context for current drug policy debates, examining the lived experiences of people struggling with addiction, and offering a significant history of the region’s approach to addiction. The book has earned numerous accolades, including the 2025 Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize.
“Exhaustively researched…Rehab on the Range intelligently describes one of the nation’s first and largest experiments in federally funded drug treatment, examining it within a century-long context of public and legal attitudes toward addiction,” wrote the Texas Observer. “Karibo looks critically at all stages of the experiment: conception, execution, patient experience, external challenges…Fundamentally, this book reveals how the United States—and Texas—has long struggled to understand its own attitudes about drug addiction. These questions were already being asked 100 years ago, and we’re still waiting for answers.”
The Journal of Texas History praised the work for positioning Texas as a focal point in the history of narcotics policy.
Karibo is an associate professor of history at Oklahoma State University. She is the author of several books, including the award-winning Sin City North: Sex, Drugs, and Citizenship in the Detroit-Windsor Borderland, and is co-editor of Border Policing: A History of Enforcement and Evasion in North America.
The Texas Book Award is presented by the Friends of the TCU Library in partnership with TCU Press. The Friends support the TCU Library through advocacy, programming, and fundraising, while TCU Press publishes scholarly works focused on the history and literature of Texas and the American West. Together, they sponsor the biennial award honoring outstanding books about Texas.
