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.