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On December 29, 1996, the Society for the Study of Southern Literature recognized Janis Stout's Katherine Anne Porter: A Sense of the Times with its C. Hugh Holman Award. The presentation was made at the society's "Southern Women's Autobiography" program at the 1996 Modern Language Association Convention held in Washington, DC. Named for the late C. Hugh Holman, former editor of the Southern Literary Journal and Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the award honors the best scholarly or critical book in the field of Southern Literature which was published in a calendar year. In her acceptance, Professor Stout recognized those whose scholarship and assistance had enabled her work to win this prize. This group included Thomas F. Walsh, whose Katherine Anne Porter and Mexico was a Holman winner in 1992. Professor John Idol, president of the society, presented Professor Stout with a certificate and read the following citation:

Janis Stout's Katherine Anne Porter: A Sense of the Times, a volume in the University Press of Virginia's series Minds of the New South, is an important and well researched, well conceived and well written book which provides significant new and sometimes corrective, or at least alternative, focuses on Porter's life, thought, career, and reputation. It is an interesting biographical and critical study which offers an enlarged context for understanding her mind and work, for better understanding both the what and why of her accomplishments. The book emphasizes Porter's "intellectual growth, her opinions and cast of mind--her sensibility" and her "extraordinary breadth of acquaintance with the events and people who contributed in varied and sometimes decisive ways to the growth of what might be called the twentieth-century mind" and her responses to them with intensity and insight. It shows how Porter developed "a keen sense of her times, particularly with respect to the arts and politics and [to] the complex intersections of the two," affecting a literary artistry "generally considered one of the stellar achievements of modernism." Yet it also reminds us that her wide ranging and long life, covering most of a century, began with her as a Southerner by birth, lineage, and upbringing, against which she rebelled and became a cosmopolitan figure and writer, while still yearning for the South, which "remained at the center of her allegiances and her social affections," the "anchor to which she was tethered and around which she ranged." From the numerous good possibilities Professor Stout's book is, indeed, the appropriate winner of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature's C. Hugh Holman Award for the best historical or critical book in the field of Southern Literature which was published in 1995.