Welcome to
The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature
SSML encourages the study of Midwestern literature and culture in whatever directions the insight, imagination and curiosity of its members may lead.
2025 SSML Symposium
We look forward to the 2025 SSML Symposium, which will take place May 29-30, 2025, at the Kellogg Hotel and Conference Center in East Lansing, Michigan. A call for papers and a registration form are available on the symposium page.
Sign up for emails
If you want to be on the SSML mailing list, go here. You’ll receive calls for papers, news of relevant publications, and conference information.
2025 THE MidAMERICA AWARD
MICHAEL KIM ROOS IS THE 2025 MIDAMERICA AWARD WINNER
Hemingway scholar Michael Kim Roos’s distinguished contributions to the study of Midwestern literature are multi-faceted. Mike is the author of One Small Town, One Crazy Coach: The Ireland Spuds and the 1963 Indiana High School Basketball Season (2013) and the co-author of Reading Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms: A Glossary and Commentary (2019), as well as many scholarly essays and articles on Hemingway and Minnesota Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan that were published in The Hemingway Review, MidAmerica, Midwestern Miscellany, The Journal of Popular Culture, Teaching Hemingway in the Natural World,, and other academic journals and books. He has also presented on Hemingway at four conferences of The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature and at Hemingway Society conferences in Oak Park, Petoskey, San Francisco, Lausanne, Venice, and Paris.
Mike has also made distinguished contributions to Midwestern literature through his teaching. At the University of Cincinnati’s Blue Ash College, Mike taught courses ranging from “Bob Dylan and the Beatles” to “Ernest Hemingway in the 1920s” and “Hemingway and
Fitzgerald in the 1920s”; most recently, he has led a seminar on A Farewell to Arms.
As a singer-songwriter, Mike has provided audiences with new perspectives on Hemingway’s work with his Hemingway-themed songs that he has performed at two annual conferences of The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, as well as other venues, including the Eiffel Tower at the Hemingway Society conference in Paris.
Mike Roos was educated at the University of Evansville (BA) and Miami University of Ohio (MA).He will be the fifty-third recipient of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature’s MidAmerica Award, which has been given annually since 1977. Past recipients
include John T. Flanagan, James Seaton, Donald Pizer, James R. Shortridge and our 2024 winner, Ann E. Ransford.
2025 MARK TWAIN
THE 2025 MARK TWAIN AWARD GOES TO ANA CASTILLO
Chicago has figured largely in the life and work of American Book Award winner Ana Castillo. Born, raised, and educated there, she is the author of more than fifteen works of fiction, poetry, drama and nonfiction, many of which evoke her Chicago experience. Her 1999 novel Peel My Love Like an Onion and her 2005 novel, Watercolor Women/Opaque Men: A Novel in Verse are set in Chicago. Her native city also figures in some of the stories in Loverboys (1990),
as well as in her memoir in essays, Black Dove, Mama, Mi’jo, and Me (2018). Her “Chi-Town Born and Bred, Twentieth Century Girl Propelled with Flare into the Third Millennium” has been called her homage to her hometown; one critic has opined that her poem, “I Ask the Impossible,” evokes the voice of Carl Sandburg. (encyclopedia.com; accessed 6 June 2024).
Ana Castillo was educated at Northeastern University (BA), the University of Chicago (MA), and the University of Bremen (PhD). She has served as a writer-in-residence for the Illinois Arts Council and been elected to the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. She has taught at Malcolm X College in Chicago and later held the first Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz Endowed Chair at DePaul University. Her latest book is Dona Cleanwell Leaves Home (2023).
Ana Castillo is the forty-seventh winner of the Mark Twain Award for distinguished contributions to Midwestern literature, given annually by The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature since 1980. Past winners include Gwendolyn Brooks, Ted Kooser, Tim O’Brien, Gerald Vizenor, and our 2024 winner, Haki R. Madhubuti (formerly Don L. Lee).
