Hall of Fame Member Biographies

Stanley W. Hoig

Oklahoma has produced many notable writers and historians and standing proudly among the best of them is Stanley W. Hoig.  Stan Hoig earned his B.A. in 1949 as an English major and history minor at Oklahoma State University and went on to the University of Oklahoma where he earned his M.A. in 1964 in journalism with a history minor and his Ph.D. in 1971 in higher education and history.  He was employed by the University of Central Oklahoma in 1964 (then Central State College) as a journalism professor.  He regaled his students with stories of Oklahoma and inspired them to be writers and thus became one of the campus’s most popular lecturers.  Born in Duncan, Oklahoma, and raised in Gage, Professor Hoig loved the state’s history and wrote about it until his death in 2009.  And write he did.  He published 23 books on Oklahoma’s western heritage and particularly about its Native American ancestry; he contributed to a host of encyclopedias on western, Native American, and Oklahoma history and produced four local histories, primarily about Edmond and Central State.  He served as an adviser to television shows on Native American and Oklahoma history.  Through his extensive publications, Stanley Hoig earned numerous writing awards: Clement E. Trout Writing Award (OSU), U.S. Treasury Department Award, two Muriel H. Wright Awards (from Oklahoma Historical Society), Distinguished Scholar Award (American Association of University Professors), the Ralph Ellison Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book, and The Myers Center Award for his Trail of Tears book (given for “outstanding work on intolerance”).  Other Hall of Fame awards received by Dr. Hoig, include:  Edmond (1990), Oklahoma Journalism (1994) and Oklahoma Historians (1997).  For his outstanding work in the classroom and for his exemplary and prestigious career chronicling the history of Native Americans and Oklahomans, the Oklahoma Higher Education Society is honored to induct Stanely W. Hoig into the Oklahoma Higher Education Hall of Fame.