Previous winners
David D. Anderson Award
2023
Guest Judge: William Blazek
AWARD WINNER
Crystal S. Rudds. "On Perspective and Value: Black Urbanism, Black Interiors, and Public Housing Fiction." American Literature, September 2022, vol. 94, no. 3, pp. 527-549.
HONORABLE MENTION
Molly Becker. “Talking American in the Midwest: Linguistic Diversity and Authenticity in the Twentieth-Century United States.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 56, no. 1, 2022, pp. 65–86.
Alex Zweber Leslie. “Race, Region, and the Black Midwest in the Dunbar Decades.” American Literary History, vol. 34 no. 2, 2022, pp. 449-476.
2022
Award Winner
Nathaniel Mills, “Aggravated into Writing: Margaret Walker, Iowa, and the Workshopping of African American Literature.” American Quarterly, vol. 73, no. 2, 2021, pp. 233-259.
HONORABLE MENTION
T. Austin Graham, “The Unacknowledged War:’ Dunbar’s History of White Revisionism.” American Literature, vol. 93, no. 1, 2021, pp. 59–85.
Olga L. Herrera, “Across Neighborhood and National Boundaries: Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, and Mexican Chicago.” Chicago: A Literary History. Ed. Frederik Byrn Køhlert. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2021, pp. 387-399.
2021
Guest Judge: Dr. Theresa Delgadillo
Award Winner
Meg Gillette, “Keeping Queer Company in the Short Fiction of Alice French.” American Literary Realism, vol. 53, no. 2, 2021, pp. 138-158.
Honorable Mention
Lydia R. Cooper, “The Problem of Trans-Figuration: Gender, the Jesuits, and the Ojibwe in Louise Erdrich’s The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse.” GLQ, vol. 26, no. 4, 2020, pp. 621-647.
Allison Hammer, “Epic Stone Butch: Transmasculinity in the Work of Willa Cather.” Transgender Studies Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 1, 2020, pp. 77-98.
2020
Guest Judge: Dr. Terrion Williamson
Award Winner
Mary Unger, “The Book Circle: Black Women Readers and Middlebrow Taste in Chicago, 1943-1953.” Reception, vol. 11, no. 1, 2019, pp. 8-20.
Honorable Mention
Evelyn Funda, "'New World' Visions and Homegrown Art: National Authenticity in the Works of Willa Cather and Antonin Dvorak." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 65, no. 2, 2019, pp. 264-284.
Vanessa Steinroetter, "Unsettling Landscapes: Prairie Madness and EcoGothic Themes in US Plains Literature." Great Plains Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 3, 2019, pp. 291-310.
2019
Guest Judge: Dr. Liesl Olson
Award Winner
Mollie Godfrey, “Sheep, Rats, and Jungle Beasts: Black Humanisms and the Protest Fiction Debate.” Arizona Quarterly, vol. 74, no. 2, 2018, pp. 39-62.
Honorable Mention
Sigrid Anderson Cordell, “Between Refugee and ‘Normalized’ Citizen: National Narratives of Exclusion in the Novels of Bich Minh Nguyen.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 49, no. 3, 2018, pp. 383-399.
Michelle Niemann, “Towards an Ecopoetics of Food: Plants, Agricultural Politics, and Colonized Landscapes in Lorine Niedecker’s Condensery.” Modernism/modernity, vol. 25, no. 1, 2018, pp. 135-160.
