The Warren–Brooks Award for literary criticism was established to honor the innovative, critical interpretation of literature offered by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks to celebrate the continuation of such achievement. It is awarded for outstanding literary criticism originally published in English in the United States of America and is given in those years when a book, or other worthy publication, appears that exemplifies the Warren–Brooks effort in spirit, scope, and integrity.
The award is given annually by the advisory group of the Center for Robert Penn Warren Studies at Western Kentucky University for outstanding literary criticism originally published in English in the United States.
Past winners of the award include:
Simpson, Lewis P., The Fable of the Southern Writer, LSU Press, 1995
Winchell, Mark Royden, Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Criticism, University of Virginia Press, 1996
Hollander, John, The Work of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 1997
Donoghue, Denis, The Practice of Reading, Yale University Press, 1998
Schuchard, Ron, Eliot's Dark Angel, Oxford University Press, 1999
Kermode, Sir Frank, Shakespeare's Language, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2000
Murphy, Paul V., The Rebuke of History North Carolina Press, 2001
Burt, Stephanie, Randall Jarrell and His Age Columbia University Press, November 2002
Buell, Lawrence, Emerson, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003
(shared) Justus, James H., Fetching the Old Southwest, University of Missouri Press; Perloff, Marjorie, Differentials, University of Alabama Press
Hassett, Constance W., “Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style,” University of Virginia Press, 2005
Rosen, David, Power, Plain English, and the Rise of Modern Poetry, Yale University Press, 2006
Dolven, Jeff, Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance, University of Chicago Press, 2007
Brinkmeyer, Robert Jr., The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism, 1930-1950, Louisiana State University Press, 2008
Travis, Peter, Disseminal Chaucer: Rereading the Nun's Priest's Tale, University of Notre Dame Press, 2009
Payne, Mark, The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination, University of Chicago Press, 2010
Strier, Richard, The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton, University of Chicago Press, 2011
Martin, Meredith, The Rise and Fall of Meter: Poetry and English National Culture, 1860-1930, Princeton University Press, 2012
Brombert, Victor, Musings on Mortality: Tolstoy to Primo Levi, University of Chicago Press, 2013
Russell, Richard Rankin, Seamus Heaney's Regions, University of Notre Dame Press, 2014
Keniston, Ann, Ghostly Figures: Memory and Belatedness in Postwar American Poetry, University of Iowa Press, 2015
Ravinthiran, Vidyan, Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic, Bucknell University Press, 2016
Costello, Bonnie, The Plural of Us: Poetry and Community in Auden and Others, Princeton University Press, 2017
Polley, Diana Hope, Echoes of Emerson: Rethinking Realism in Twain, James, Wharton, and Cather, University Alabama Press, 2017
Fulford, Tim, Wordsworth's Poetry, 1815-1845, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019
Shifflett, Joan Romano, Warren, Jarrell, & Lowell: Collaboration in the Reshaping of American Poetry, Louisiana State University Press, 2020
Quayson, Ato, Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature, Cambridge University Press, 2021
Menely, Tobias, Climate and the Making of Worlds: Toward a Geohistorical Poetics, University of Chicago Press, 2021