The Conference on Christianity and Literature is pleased to announce that Jewel Spears Brooker is a recipient of the 2022 CCL Lifetime Achievement Award. The award citation reads as follows:

The Conference on Christianity and Literature honors Jewel Spears Brooker as the recipient of the 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award. As a former President of the Conference on Christianity and Literature and a world-renowned expert on Modernist literature, Dr. Brooker's career as teacher, scholar, and leader has demonstrated a deep commitment to literature that addresses the most profound questions of human existence and meaning. The author or editor of 11 books, Dr. Brooker is one of the pre-eminent T. S. Eliot scholars of the past half-century.  Her most recent book is T. S. Eliot's Dialectical Imagination (2018), and she has co-edited (with Ronald Schuchard) two volumes of the critical edition of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: Apprentice Years, 1905-1918 (2014) and Still and Still Moving, 1954-1965 (2019).  She also wrote Mastery and Escape: T. S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism (1994) and Reading The Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation (1990, co-author, Joseph Bentley). She has also edited T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews (2004), Approaches to Teaching Eliot's Poetry and Plays (1988), and Conversations with Denise Levertov (1998). Combining the close-reading sensibilities of a first-rate literary critic with philosophical, theoretical, and theological acumen, Dr. Brooker has led readers of Eliot on a “hermeneutical journey” in which we return to familiar texts again and know them for the first time.