Alicia Elliott has won the 2020 Evergreen Award for her essay collection A Mind Spread Out on the Ground.

The Evergreen Award is part of the annual Ontario-wide Forest of Reading program, inviting people to read and vote on a selection of Canadian fiction and nonfiction titles curated by librarians.

Book clubs, public libraries and other community forums can participate in the program. Readers from more than 85 libraries participated in the 2020 program.

In A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, Elliott explores the systemic oppression faced by Indigenous peoples across Canada through the lens of her own experiences as a Tuscarora writer from Six Nations of the Grand River. She looks at how colonial violence, including the loss of language, seeps into the present day lives of Indigenous people, often in the form of mental illness.

A Mind Spread Out on the Ground was on the shortlist for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.

Elliott, a Haudenosaunee writer who lives in Brantford, Ont., won gold at the National Magazine Awards in 2017 for the essay this book is based on. She was chosen by Tanya Talaga as the recipient for the 2018 RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Award.

CBC Books named Elliott a writer to watch in 2019.

Past winners of the Evergreen Award include Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice, The Last Neanderthal by Claire Cameron and The Break by Katherena Vermette.

The Forest of Reading program also has six English-language categories for readers in kindergarten through to high school. The finalists for those categories were announced earlier in October 2020.

The Forest of Reading program is organized by the Ontario Library Association.