Mark Twain Award
Each year, the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature presents the Mark Twain Award to a living writer for distinguished contributions to Midwestern literature.
We encourage members to nominate an individual for the award. The Mark Twain honoree need not be a member of SSML.
Nominations can be sent to the SSML email account at ssmlmidwestlit@gmail.com by May 1. Please include your name (as nominator) and a brief, 250-word statement regarding the nominee’s qualifications for the award. Only SSML members are eligible to make nominations.
2025 Mark Twain Award
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).
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).
