At the heart of the Literary Festival lies the prestigious F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature, a distinguished honor bestowed upon an eminent American writer. The recipient, gracing the festival with their presence, not only receives the accolade but also engages attendees with a captivating reading and master class.
Notably, the festival has proudly included Pulitzer Prize winners among its distinguished recipients over the years, showcasing a tradition of honoring some of the most illustrious figures in American literature from the past half-century.
We invite you to view the list of honorees for previous years, dating back to the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival’s founding in 1996.
2025 Festival Honoree:
Percival Everett
Winner of numerous awards and accolades, including the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the 2024 Kirkus Prize for Fiction, and the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction for his novel James.
Special Guest:
Madison Smartt Bell
Madison Smartt Bell is an acclaimed American author.
Percival Everett is a celebrated American author, poet, and academic known for his diverse body of work that spans novels, short stories, and poetry. With over thirty books to his name, he is also the winner of numerous awards for his 2024 novel James. For James, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2025, the Kirkus Prize for Fiction in 2024, and the National Book Award for Fiction in 2025. Everett has made a lasting impact on contemporary literature through his exploration of race, identity, and the human condition, often with an infusion of wit and satire. James is a brilliant, action-packed reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and darkly humorous, told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view. His many other novels include Erasure (2001), a searing critique of racial stereotypes in publishing (on which the film American Fiction was based), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), a humorous and complex take on identity, and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and combines mystery with social critique. Everett’s style defies easy categorization. He is praised for his ability to navigate genre-bending themes with both intellectual rigor and humor. In addition to his writing, Everett is a professor of English at the University of Southern California, where he shares his craft with emerging writers and scholars. He has received numerous accolades throughout his career, including the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction and the Dos Passos Prize for Literature. Everett’s work often challenges readers to question their assumptions about race, power, and truth. He is firmly established as one of the most influential voices in contemporary American literature.
Madison Smartt Bell is the author of twelve novels, three collections of short stories, biographies of Toussaint Louverture (2007) and Robert Stone (2020), and four other books of non-fiction. His novel All Souls’ Rising (1995) was a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award and won the Anisfield-tWolf Award for the best book of the year dealing with race and the Maryland Author Award. In 1996, Granta selected him as one of the “Best American Novelists Under Forty”; in 2001, he won the John Dos Passos Prize for Excellence in Literature; in 2008, he won a Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and in 2015 he won the Paul Bowles Award for Fiction. His short fiction has been reprinted in Best American Short Stories and the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. He has an undergraduate degree from Princeton University and an MFA from Hollins University. His work has appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The New York Review of Books, and The Paris Review. He has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, and the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. He taught creative writing at Goucher College from 1984 to 2023, along with his wife, the poet Elizabeth Spires.