The Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize is a literary prize created in 1988 by the newspaper The Chicago Tribune . It is awarded yearly in two categories: Fiction and Nonfiction. These prizes are awarded to books that "reinforce and perpetuate the values of heartland America." [1]
Karen Louise Erdrich is a Native American author of novels, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American characters and settings. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians of North Dakota, a federally recognized tribe of Ojibwe people.
Jonathan Earl Franzen is an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel The Corrections drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, earned a James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. His novel Freedom (2010) garnered similar praise and led to an appearance on the cover of Time magazine alongside the headline "Great American Novelist". Franzen's latest novel Crossroads was published in 2021, and is the first in a projected trilogy.
Louis Menand is an American critic, essayist, and professor who wrote the Pulitzer-winning book The Metaphysical Club (2001), an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th- and early 20th-century America.
Taylor Branch is an American author and historian who wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning trilogy chronicling the life of Martin Luther King Jr. and much of the history of the American civil rights movement. The final volume of the 2,912-page trilogy, collectively called America in the King Years, was released in January 2006, and an abridgment, The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement, was published in 2013.
Rebecca L. Skloot is an American science writer who specializes in science and medicine. Her first book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010), was one of the best-selling new books of 2010, staying on The New York Times Bestseller list for over 6 years and eventually reaching #1. It was adapted into a movie by George C. Wolfe, which premiered on HBO on April 22, 2017, and starred Rose Byrne as Skloot, and Oprah Winfrey as Lacks's daughter Deborah.
The Chicago Humanities Festival is a non-profit organization which hosts an annual series of lectures, concerts, and films in Chicago, Illinois, United States. There are two seasons each year, including a spring festival from April through May, and a longer fall festival from September through November. The festival was started in 1989 by the Illinois Humanities Council and became an independent organization in 1997. Each year of programming is connected to a broader theme and covers a wide variety of topics in the arts, politics and society, and science and technology.
The Michigan Quarterly Review is an American literary magazine founded in 1962 and published at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Melissa Fay Greene is an American nonfiction author. A 1975 graduate of Oberlin College, Greene is the author of six books of nonfiction, a two-time National Book Award finalist, a 2011 inductee into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, and a 2015 recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts.
Isabel Wilkerson is an American journalist and the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010) and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020). She is the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.
Philip Graham is an American author, professor, and editor. He is one of the founders, and the current editor-at-large, of the literary/arts journal, Ninth Letter, which won the MLA’s Best New Literary Journal Award in 2005. He is a professor emeritus in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he received three campus-wide teaching awards. He has also taught in the low-residency MFA program of the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Additionally, he is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, two Illinois Arts Council grants, and the William Peden Prize in Fiction from The Missouri Review, as well as fellowship residencies at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo artists' colony.
Floyd Skloot is an American poet, novelist, and memoirist. Some of his work concerns his experience with neurological damage caused by a virus contracted in 1988.
Nick Reding is an American journalist. His work has appeared in Harper's Bazaar, Food and Wine, Outside, Fast Company, and Details.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010) is a non-fiction book by American author Rebecca Skloot. It was the 2011 winner of the National Academies Communication Award for best creative work that helps the public understanding of topics in science, engineering or medicine.
America in the King Years is a three-volume history of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement by Taylor Branch, which he wrote between 1982 and 2006. The three individual volumes have won a variety of awards, including the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for History.
Rebecca Makkai is an American novelist and short-story writer, and was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.
Paul Hendrickson is an American author, journalist, and professor. He is a senior lecturer and member of the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a former member of the writing staff at the Washington Post.
Negroland: A Memoir is a 2015 book by Margo Jefferson. It is a memoir of growing up in 1950s and 1960s America within a small, privileged segment of black American society known as the black bourgeoisie, or African-American upper class.
The Chicago Review of Books is an online literary publication of StoryStudio Chicago that reviews recent books covering diverse genres, presses, voices, and media. The magazine was started in 2016 by founding editor Adam Morgan. It is considered a sister publication of Arcturus, which publishes original fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.
Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder is a 2017 biography of Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder, by Caroline Fraser. It was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize.
Thomas Dyja is an American writer, living in New York City. He has written three novels, a biography of civil rights activist Walter Francis White, historical books on Chicago and New York City. Play For A Kingdom received the Casey Award and The Third Coast won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Nonfiction.