Will Bagley was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah in 2008/2009. He has written and edited more than twenty books on overland emigration, frontier violence, railroads, mining, and the Mormons. His University of Oklahoma Press book with David L. Bigler, The Mormon Rebellion: America’s First Civil War, won the 2012 Western Writers of America Spur Award for Best Western Nonfiction Historical and The John Whitmer Historical Association's Smith-Pettit Best Book in Latter Day Saint History Award.