ST. LOUIS – Tickets for the St. Louis Literary Award ceremony honoring Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead will go on sale Friday, Feb. 7, at 10 a.m. Whitehead will receive the award on April 9 at the Sheldon Concert Hall.

Tickets for the 2025 St. Louis Literary Award event are $15 and available through Metrotix.

Whitehead is the author of the novels “The Intuitionist,” “John Henry Days,” “Apex Hides the Hurt,” “Sag Harbor,” “The Underground Railroad,” “The Nickel Boys,” and “Harlem Shuffle,” among others. He also penned a book of essays about New York City, “The Colossus of New York.”

Whitehead graduated from Harvard College and worked as a television, books and music reviewer at the Village Voice.

In addition to the Pulitzer, “The Underground Railroad,” won the National Book Award and the Carnegie Medal for Fiction. “The Nickel Boys” won the Pulitzer Prize, the Kirkus Prize, and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.

Whitehead has been a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway, PEN/Faulkner, Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Fiction Award and has received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.

He has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, the Dos Passos Prize, and a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

Whitehead was named the New York State Author in 2018 and awarded the Prize for American Fiction from the Library of Congress in 2020.

Whitehead has taught at the University of Houston, Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University. He has also served as a writer-in-residence at Vassar College, the University of Richmond, and the University of Wyoming.

Buy Tickets

The St. Louis Literary Award department in SLU Libraries also includes a Campus Read series, which is open to the public; the Undergraduate Writing Award; Literature & Medicine; Inspired By Arts Showcase for High School and College Students; and the Walter J. Ong S.J. Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Research. 

St. Louis Literary Award 

The St. Louis Literary Award is presented annually by the Saint Louis University Libraries and has become one of the top literary prizes in the country. The award honors a writer who deepens our insight into the human condition and expands the scope of our compassion. Some of the most important writers of the 20th and 21st centuries have come to Saint Louis University to accept the honor, including Margaret Atwood, Salmon Rushdie, Eudora Welty, John Updike, Saul Bellow, August Wilson, Stephen Sondheim, Zadie Smith and Tom Wolfe.

Saint Louis University

Founded in 1818, Saint Louis University is one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious Catholic institutions. Rooted in Jesuit values and its pioneering history as the first university west of the Mississippi River, SLU offers more than 15,200 students a rigorous, transformative education of the whole person. At the core of the University’s diverse community of scholars is SLU’s service-focused mission, which challenges and prepares students to make the world a better, more just place.