, by Cynthia Leal Massey, has won a 2023 San Antonio Conservation Society Publication Award.){kind=link}
Massey Wins 2023 San Antonio Conservation Society Publication Award
What Lies Beneath, Texas Pioneer Cemeteries and Graveyards (TwoDot Books), by Cynthia Leal Massey, has won a 2023 San Antonio Conservation Society Publication Award, joining nine other Texas authors this year. An award ceremony will be held on March 24.
This is Massey’s second SACS award. Her book, Death of a Texas Ranger, A True Story of Murder and Vengeance on the Texas Frontier, was honored with a 2015 SACS Award. The Society’s Publication Award recognizes the authors of the best recently published books on Texas history.
What Lies Beneath, Texas Pioneer Cemeteries and Graveyards exhumes the stories of Texas pioneers, revealing the intriguing truth behind the earliest graveyards in the Lone Star State, including some of its most ancient. This guide also provides descriptions of headstone features and symbols, and demystifies the burial traditions of early Texas pioneers and settlers.
One reviewer wrote, “The author’s depth of research presents not just a scholarly work, but a masterful storytelling encounter that will truly captivate. It was difficult to put this book down and I completed it in a matter of days…”
Massey is a former corporate editor, college instructor, and magazine editor. She has published hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles and several books. Born and raised on the south side of San Antonio, Texas, she has resided in Helotes, twenty miles northwest of the Alamo City, since 1994. A full-time writer, she is a past president of Women Writing the West and a winner of the Lone Star Award for Magazine Journalism given by the Houston Press Club.