SLU Community Invited to Participate in St. Louis Literary Award Events
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead will receive the 2025 St. Louis Literary Award on Wednesday, April 9.
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.”
Colson Whitehead. Photo by Chris Close.
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.
Literary Award Week Events
Monday, April 7
Saint Louis University’s Visual and Performing Arts Department, Art History program, St. Louis Literary Award Programs, and the Kranzberg Arts Foundation will host a public panel discussion on the intersection of art, history, and literature.
Acclaimed muralist Dominic Chambers will discuss his Underground Railroad-themed mural on SLU's Searls Hall, inspired by Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel,
The Underground Railroad. Joining him is historian Dorris Keeven-Franke, an expert
on Missouri’s Underground Railroad history and Executive Director of the Missouri
Germans Consortium. Her work preserves the stories of enslaved people seeking freedom
and the abolitionists who aided them.
The panel will be held at 12 p.m. Monday, April 7, in SLU's Pius XII Memorial Library,
in the 2nd-floor gallery. A reception will follow.
Wednesday, April 9
Saint Louis University will honor Colson Whitehead at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, April 9, at Sheldon Concert Hall. Tickets for the 2025 St. Louis Literary Award presentation are still available for purchase. Tickets are $15.
Thursday, April 10
Colson Whitehead will participate in an Author Craft Talk moderated by Ron Austin, assistant professor of English at Saint Louis University. Whitehead, the 58th recipient of the St. Louis Literary Award, will participate in a discussion about the craft of writing and his long and distinguished career.
A craft talk will be held at 12 p.m. on Thursday, April 10, in the Wool Ballroom of the Busch Student Center. The craft talk is free, but registration is required.
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 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.
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