Chicago Literary Hall of Fame

Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation Awards CLHOF 3-Year Grant

The board of the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation has awarded the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame a three-year operational grant totaling $18,000. GDDF's continuing support of our organization has enabled us to sustain and grow operations, including programming and the production of book projects. With this new grant, the CLHOF will be able to upgrade and expand website content, stage our signature programs, and continue to vigorously connect our audience to Chicago authors, books and literary programs.

Register Now for CLHOF's Year-End Party Fundraiser

The Chicago Literary Hall of Fame's year-end gathering is always a lot of fun, and is an important event for us to raise funds. Registration is now open for our 2023 iteration, which takes place from 1:30-3:30 on Saturday, Dec. 2 at The Beat Kitchen. Money raised at this party will help us fund future programming, cover our administrative costs, help us continue to create more robust content covering our city's great literary life, and generally help us sustain a mission to celebrate writers and writing. Please come to the event, if you're able.

Patricia Smith and Alex Kotlowitz to Receive 2024 Fuller Awards; New CLHOF Class Selected

Our 2024 Fuller Award honorees, as well as our newest induction class, have been selected.

Patricia Smith and Alex Kotlowitz will receive Fuller Awards for lifetime achievement at award ceremonies next year. Smith will be honored in the spring and Kotlowitz in the fall. Details about these ceremonies are forthcoming. Hamlin Garland, Eunice Tietjens and E. Donald Two-Rivers comprise our 2023 CLHOF class of historical writers; they will be honored in the summer of 2024.

Smith is the 2021 recipient of the Poetry Foundation's Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement, and a 2022 inductee of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She is the author of nine books of poetry, including Unshuttered (Feb 2023); Incendiary Art, winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist; and Gotta Go, Gotta Flow, a collaboration with award-winning Chicago photographer Michael Abramson. Her other books include the poetry volumes Teahouse of the Almighty, Close to Death, Big Towns Big Talk, Life According to Motown; the children's book Janna and the Kings and the history Africans in America, a companion book to the award-winning PBS series. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Baffler, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Tin House and in Best American Poetry, Best American Essays and Best American Mystery Stories. She co-edited The Golden Shovel Anthology—New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks and edited the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir.

Kotlowitz is the author of four books, including his most recent, An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago which received the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize. His other books include the national bestseller There Are No Children Here, which the New York Public Library selected as one of the 150 most important books of the twentieth century. It received the Helen B. Bernstein Award and was adapted as a television movie produced by and starring Oprah Winfrey. It was selected by The New York Times as a Notable Book of the Year along with his second book, The Other Side of the River which also received The Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize for Nonfiction. His book on Chicago, Never a City So Real, was recently released in paperback. Kotlowitz has also worked in film and radio. His documentary, The Interrupters, a collaboration with Steve James, premiered at Sundance in January 2011 and aired as a two-hour special on PBS’s FRONTLINE. It was cited as one of the best films of the year by The New Yorker, The Chicago Tribune, Entertainment Weekly and The LA Times. For the film, Kotlowitz received an Emmy, a Cinema Eye Award and an Independent Spirit Award. A former staff writer at The Wall Street Journal, Alex’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and on This American Life. His stories, which one reviewer wrote “inform the heart”, have also appeared in Granta, Rolling Stone, The Chicago Tribune, Slate and The Washington Post, as well as on PBS (Frontline, the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour and Media Matters) and on NPR’s All Things Considered and Morning Edition. His play, An Unobstructed View, written with Amy Drozdowska, premiered in Chicago in June 2005. In 2016, Alex worked with inmates at Illinois’ Stateville prison on essays about their cells. The stories which ran on The New Yorker’s website and on The New Yorker’s Radio Hour became the basis for the podcast Written Inside. NPR’s Lauren Ober, who picked it as one of the top ten podcasts of the year, wrote: “It’s an intimate look at life behind bars that will likely change the way you think about incarceration.” Alex has been honored in all three mediums, including two Peabodys, two Columbia duPonts, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and the George Polk Award. He’s the recipient of eight honorary degrees, the John LaFarge Memorial Award for Interracial Justice given by New York’s Catholic Interracial Council and the 2019 Harold Washington Literary Award. He also received the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters for his books which “illuminate astonishing national inequities through the lens of individual experience.”