Liesl Olson is director of Chicago Studies at the Newberry library. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Olson has written widely on twentieth-century literature and art, including her first book Modernism and the Ordinary (Oxford University Press, 2009) and her most recent book Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis (Yale University Press, 2017), which won the 2018 Pegasus Award from the Poetry Foundation for best book of poetry criticism, and the 2019 Mid-America Award from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature.
CONTRIBUTOR ARTICLES
Waves of Transformation: Five Women of the Chicago Avant-Garde
LARB presents an excerpt from “Chicago Avant-Garde: Five Women Ahead of Their Time.”...
Cad of the Century: Two New Biographies of Ben Hecht
Liesl Olson digs into two new biographies of Ben Hecht by Adina Hoffman and Julien Gorbach....
My L.A. in Four Locations: Little Worlds
My L.A. in Four Locations is a running feature. This week, Liesl Olson describes the little worlds she discovered and built in Los Angeles....
Midwest Interludes: Three Vignettes of the Chicago Renaissance
Liesl Olson shares three vignettes from “Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis.”...
Carl Sandburg’s Chicago: Stormy, Husky, Brawling at 100
It’s time to read Carl Sandburg again....
