Roberta Trites, a distinguished professor of English and interim chair of the department of management and quantitative methods in the College of Business at Illinois State University, has been selected to receive the 16th International Brothers Grimm Award from the International Institute for Children’s Literature in Osaka, Japan. The award is given out every other year to a scholar for outstanding research in children’s literature. Professor Trites is the first American woman to earn the award. She will be honored in Japan in October and receive a prize of one million yen.
Professor Trites first book was Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children’s Novels (University of Iowa Press, 1997). Her latest and forthcoming work is Twenty-First Century Feminisms in Children’s and Adolescent Literature (University of Mississippi Press, 2018).
Professor Trites joined the faculty at Illinois State University in 1991 and was promoted to full professor in 2001. She is a graduate of Texas A&M University, where she majored in history. Dr. Trites holds a master’s degree in the humanities from the University of Texas at Dallas and a Ph.D. in English from Baylor University in Waco, Texas.