| 2025 | Winner | Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life | Jason Roberts | Random House |
| 2025 | Finalist | All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today | Elizabeth Comen | HarperCollins |
| 2025 | Finalist | Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World | Kelly Clancy | Penguin Publishing Group |
| 2025 | Finalist | The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with Our Wild Neighbors | Erika Howsare | Unknown |
| 2025 | Finalist | The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years | Sunil Amrith | W. W. Norton |
| 2024 | Winner | California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline | Rosanna Xia | Heyday |
| 2024 | Finalist | Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet | Ben Goldfarb | W. W. Norton |
| 2024 | Finalist | In the Blood: How Two Outsiders Solved a Centuries-Old Medical Mystery and Took on the US Army | Charles Barber | Grand Central Publishing |
| 2024 | Finalist | The Bathysphere Book: Effects of the Luminous Ocean Depths | Brad Fox | Astra House |
| 2024 | Finalist | Womb: The Inside Story of How It All Began | Leah Hazard | HarperCollins |
| 2023 | Winner | Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey | Florence Williams | W. W. Norton |
| 2023 | Finalist | Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution's Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction | David George Haskell | Viking |
| 2023 | Finalist | The Big Bang of Numbers: How to Build the Universe Using Only Math | Manil Suri | W. W. Norton |
| 2023 | Finalist | Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage | Rachel E. Gross | W. W. Norton |
| 2022 | Winner | Fox & I: An Uncommon Friendship | Catherine Raven | Spiegel & Grau |
| 2022 | Finalist | Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World | Lisa Wells | Macmillan |
| 2022 | Finalist | Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive | Carl Zimmer | Penguin Press |
| 2022 | Finalist | The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, & Dreams Deferred | Chanda Prescod-Weinstein | Bold Type Books |
| 2022 | Finalist | The Memory Thief: And the Secrets Behind What We Remember — A Medical Mystery | Lauren Aguirre | Simon & Schuster |
| 2021 | Winner | Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World's Largest Owl | Jonathan Slaght | Picador |
| 2021 | Finalist | Fathoms: The World in the Whale | Rebecca Giggs | Simon & Schuster |
| 2021 | Finalist | The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think | Jennifer Ackerman | Penguin Press |
| 2021 | Finalist | The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy’s Vanishing Explorers | Emily Levesque | Sourcebooks |
| 2021 | Finalist | The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move | Sonia Shah | Bloomsbury |
| 2020 | Winner | Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves | Frans de Waal | W. W. Norton |
| 2020 | Finalist | Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition | Patricia S. Churchland | W. W. Norton |
| 2020 | Finalist | Losing Earth: A Recent History | Nathaniel Rich | Pan Macmillan |
| 2020 | Finalist | On the Backs of Tortoises: Darwin, the Galapagos, and the Fate of an Evolutionary Eden | Elizabeth Hennessy | Yale University Press |
| 2020 | Finalist | The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption | Dahr Jamail | The New Press |
| 2019 | Winner | Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter | Ben Goldfarb | Chelsea Green Publishing |
| 2019 | Finalist | Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds | Lauren Slater | Unknown |
| 2019 | Finalist | She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions and Potential of Heredity | Carl Zimmer | Penguin Press |
| 2019 | Finalist | The Beginning of Everything | Andrea Buchanan | Pegasus Books |
| 2019 | Finalist | The World in a Grain | Vince Beiser | Riverhead Books |
| 2018 | Winner | The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine | Lindsey Fitzharris | Allen Lane |
| 2018 | Finalist | American Eclipse: A Nation’s Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World | David Baron | Liveright |
| 2018 | Finalist | Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst | Robert Sapolsky | Penguin Press |
| 2018 | Finalist | Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life | David Montgomery | W. W. Norton |
| 2018 | Finalist | No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America | Ron Powers | Unknown |
| 2017 | Winner | Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets | Luke Dittrich | Random House |
| 2017 | Finalist | Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History | Dan Flores | Basic Books |
| 2017 | Finalist | How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of a Private Spaceflight | Julian Guthrie | Penguin Press |
| 2017 | Finalist | Lab Girl | Hope Jahren | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
| 2017 | Finalist | The Dragon behind the Glass. A True Story of Power, Obsession, and the World's Most Coveted Fish | Emily Voight | Unknown |
| 2016 | Winner | Thunder & Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future | Lauren Redniss | Random House |
| 2016 | Finalist | Island on Fire: The Extraordinary Story of a Forgotten Volcano That Changed the World | Alexandra Witze, Jeff Kanipe | Pegasus Books |
| 2016 | Finalist | Rain: A Natural and Cultural History | Cynthia Barnett | Crown |
| 2016 | Finalist | The Boy Who Played with Fusion: Extreme Science, Extreme Parenting, and How to Make a Star | Tom Clynes | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| 2016 | Finalist | The End of Plenty: The Race to Feed a Crowded World | Joel K. Bourne Jr. | W. W. Norton |
| 2015 | Winner | War of the Whales: A True Story | Joshua Horwitz | Unknown |
| 2014 | Winner | High Price: A Neuroscientist’s Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society | Carl Hart | HarperCollins |
| 2013 | Winner | Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior | Leonard Mlodinow | Vintage Books |
| 2013 | Finalist | The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature | David G. Haskell | Viking |
| 2012 | Winner | The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood | James Gleick | Fourth Estate |
| 2012 | Finalist | Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them | Donovan Hohn | Penguin Books |
| 2011 | Winner | The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer | Siddhartha Mukherjee | Scribner |
| 2011 | Finalist | Becoming Animal | David Abram | Pantheon |