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AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS
HONORS 19 WRITERS WITH AWARDS

Academy Awards in Literature

Michael Braude Award for Light Verse

Benjamin H. Danks Award

E.M. Forster Award

Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction

Award of Merit for Poetry

Katherine Ann Porter Award

Rome Fellowships in Literature

Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award

Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award

Morton Dawen Zabel Award

Biographies of 2004 Award Winners in Literature

Nicholson Baker (Katherine Anne Porter Award) was born in 1957 and attended the Eastman School of Music and Haverford College. He has published six novels: The Mezzanine, 1988; Room Temperature, 1990, Vox, 1992; The Fermata, 1994; The Everlasting Story of Nory, 1998, and A Box of Matches, 2003; and three works of nonfiction, U and I, 1991; The Size of Thoughts, 1996; and Double Fold, 2001. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, Best American Stories, The Atlantic, Harper's, and the New York Review of Books. Mr. Baker founded the American Newspaper Repository in 1999.

Leonard Barkan (Morton Dawen Zabel Award) was born in New York City in 1944. He was educated at Swarthmore, Harvard, and Yale University. He is the Arthur W. Marks Professor of Comparative Literature and the director of the Society of Fellows at Princeton University, where he has taught since 2001. His four books of non-fiction are: Nature's Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World, 1975; The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism, 1986; Transuming Passion: Ganymede and the Erotics of Humanism, 1991; and Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture, 1999. He has edited numerous books on Renaissance Drama, and his reviews have appeared in Modern Philology, and Shakespeare Quarterly. Mr. Barkan has won many awards including a PEN Architectural Digest Prize for Literary Writing in the Visual Arts. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Henri Cole (Academy Award) was born in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1956. He grew up in Virginia and was educated at the College of William and Mary, University of Wisconsin, and Columbia University. Mr. Cole's poetry has been published in five collections: Middle Earth, 2003; The Visible Man, 1998; The Look of Things, 1995; The Zoo Wheel of Knowledge, 1989; and The Marble Queen, 1986. He has received the Kingly Tufts Poetry Award; Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation.

Anthony Doerr (Rome Fellowship) was educated at Bowdoin College and Bowling Green State University. He is the author of The Shell Collector: Stories (2002) and the forthcoming novel About Grace. He has received two O'Henry Awards for his short stories, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2003 Young Lions award from the New York Public Library for The Shell Collector. Mr. Doerr has taught at Boise State University, Bowling Green State University, and the University of Wisconsin. He is currently a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University.

Nell Freudenberger (Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction) was born in New York City in 1975. She attended Harvard University and New York University. Lucky Girls, a collection of short stories published in 2003, received the Pen/Faulkner Malamud Prize for Short Fiction. Her story ''The Tutor'' was selected for O'Henry Prize Stories and Best American Short Stories, both published in 2004. Other works of her fiction have appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, and The New Yorker.

R.S. Gwynn (Michael Braude Award for Light Verse) was born in Eden, North Carolina, in 1948. He attended Davidson College and the University of Arkansas. He has taught at Southwest Texas State University, and since 1976, at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas. He is the author of the poetry collections Bearing and Distance, 1977; The Drive-In, 1986; The Area Code of God, 1994; and No Word of Farewell: Poems 1970-2000, 2001. His satirical poem, The Narcissiad, was published in 1981. Gwynn has also edited anthologies of literature and criticism, including four for the Penguin Academics Pocket Anthology series.

Marilyn Hacker (Academy Award) was born in Bronx, New York, in 1942. She is a professor of English at The City College of New York, and a professor of French at City University of New York, Graduate Center. She has published more than twelve books of poetry including Presentation Piece, 1974; Separations, 1976; Taking Notice, 1980; Assumptions, 1985; Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons, 1986; Going Back to the River, 1990; Winter Numbers: Poems, 1994; Squares and Courtyards, 2000; and First Cities: Collected Early Poems, 2003. Hacker's translations include the work of Venus Khoury-Ghata, and Claire Malroux. Her poems, essays, and translations of other poets have been published in Poetry Daily Anthology, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Encyclopedia of American Literature, Poetry London, Clarion, Commonweal, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The New Yorker. Hacker's many awards include two National Book Critics' Circle Award nominations, an NEA grant, an Ingram-Merrill grant, and a Guggenheim fellowship.

Samuel Hynes (Academy Award) was born in 1924 in Chicago, Illinois. He graduated from the University of Minnesota and received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University. He is Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature Emeritus at Princeton University where he has taught since 1976. His works of literary criticism include The Edwardian Turn of Mind, 1962; Edwardian Occasions, 1972; The Auden Generation, 1976; and A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture, 1990. His other books are Flights of Passage: Reflections of a World War II Aviator, 1988; The Soldier's Tale, 1997; and The Growing Seasons: An American Boyhood Before the War, 2003. Mr. Hynes is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Arnost Lustig (Academy Award) was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1926. He immigrated to the United States in 1970. A survivor of three concentration camps, the Holocaust is the central theme of his fiction. He is the author of 18 books, among them A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova, 1964; The Unloved: From the Diary of Perla S., 1979; Darkness Cast No Shadow, 1977; Street of Lost Brothers, 1990; Colette, 1992; Beautiful Green Eyes, 1995; Children of the Holocaust, 1995; and Lea from Leuvoorslen, 2000. Mr. Lustig divides his time writing and teaching between the United States and the Czech Republic.

Joe Ashby Porter (Academy Award) was born in Madisonville, Kentucky, in 1942. He attended Harvard University, Oxford, and the University of California at Berkeley. He has taught at Duke University since 1980. Mr. Porter is the author of three short story collections: The Kentucky Stories, 1983; Lithuania, 1990; and Touch Wood, 2002; two novels: Eelgrass, 1977; and Resident Aliens, 2000; and two works of nonfiction on William Shakespeare. Among his honors are Pushcart Prizes, NEA/PEN Syndicated Fiction awards, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Robin Robertson (E.M. Forster Award) was born in 1955, in Scone, Scotland. His collection of poetry, A Painted Field (1997), won the UK's Forward Prize for best first book and the Scottish First Book of the Year award. His second collection, Slow Air, appeared in 2002. Since 1978 Robin Robertson has worked in publishing at Penguin Books, Secker & Warburg, and most recently Jonathan Cape, where he is deputy publishing director and poetry editor.

Louis D. Rubin, Jr. (Academy Award) was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1923, and received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. He is Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the founder and former director of Algonquin Books. He is the author of more than fifty books, including The History of Southern Literature, 1985; The Edge of the Swamp: A Study in the Literature and Society of the Old South, 1989; The Mockingbird in the Gum Tree: A Literary Gallimaufry, 1991; The Golden Weather: a Novel, 1995; An Honorable Estate: My Time in the Working Press, 200l; and My Father's People: A Family of Southern Jews, 2002. Rubin's essays and reviews have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, New York Times Book Review, Southern Review, and Washington Post Book World.

Judith Thurman (Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award) is the author of two major literary biographies which have received considerable critical acclaim. Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller (1982) won the National Book Award. Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (1999) was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book prize and the Salon Book award for biography. Ms. Thurman has written for The New Yorker since 1986, and joined their staff in 2000.

Olympia Vernon (Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award) was born in Bogalusa, Louisiana, in 1973. She was educated at Southeastern Louisiana University and received her M.F.A. from Louisiana Sate University. She has written two novels: Eden (2003) and Logic (2004).

Paula Vogel (Academy Award) was born in 1951 in Washington, D.C. She graduated from Catholic University of America. She is the Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Creative Writing at Brown University where she directs the M.F.A. playwriting program. Her plays include Desdemona, 1979; And Baby Makes Seven, 1981; The Oldest Profession, 1982; The Baltimore Waltz, 1992; Hot 'n' Throbbing, 1994; Mineola Twins, 1996; and The Long Christmas Ride Home, 2003. Her play How I Learned To Drive won an Obie, New York Drama Critics award, Outer Critics Circle award, and the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Vogel's honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, an NEA fellowship, and the Pew Charitable Trust Senior award. Her work was selected for the 2004-2005 season of the Signature Theater in New York.

Rosanna Warren (Academy Award) attended Yale and Johns Hopkins Universities. She began teaching at Boston University in 1982, and is currently the Emma MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English and Foreign Modern Languages. Ms. Warren is the author of four collections of poetry: Snow Day, 1981; Each Leaf Shines Separate, 1984; Stained Glass, 1993; Departure, 2003; one novel: The Joey Story, 1963; and a verse translation of the Euripides' play Suppliant Women. Among her awards are an Ingram Merrill Grant for Poetry, Guggenheim fellowship, Lamont Poetry prize (Academy of American Poets), Lisa Wallace Reader's Digest award, and the Witter Bynner Poetry prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Lisa Williams (Rome Fellowship) was born in 1966, in Nashville, Tennessee. She attended Belmont University in Nashville and received her M.A. from the University of Cincinnati, and her M.F.A in creative writing/poetry from the University of Virginia. She is Assistant Professor of English at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. Her book of poetry, The Hammered Dulcimer was published in 1998. Her poems have been published in Southeast Review, Raritan, The New Republic, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Williams has won an Academy of American Poets prize (University of Virginia), and a May Swenson Poetry award.

Greg Williamson (Academy Award) was born in 1964, in Columbus, Ohio. He attended Vanderbilt University, University of Wisconsin, and Johns Hopkins, where he has taught since 1989. His first collection of poetry, The Silent Partner, won the 1995 Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. In 1998, Mr. Williamson received the Whiting Writers' award, and the Elizabeth Matchett Stover Memorial award for the best poem of the year in Southwest Review. His second book, Errors in the Script, was published in 2001.

Doug Wright (Benjamin H. Danks Award) was educated at Yale University and received his M.F.A. from New York University. He has taught playwriting at N.Y.U. and Princeton University. His plays include The Stonewater Rapture, 1984; Interrogating the Nude, 1989; Quills, 1995; Watbanaland, 1995; I Am My Own Wife, 2003, and a musical, Buzzsaw Berkely, 1989, with music and lyrics by Michael John LaChiusa. Quills received the 1995 Kesselring prize for Best New American Play from the National Arts Club and a 1995 Obie award for Outstanding Achievement in Playwriting. Wright has received the William L. Bradely fellowship at Yale University, the Charles MacAthur fellowship at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, an HBO fellowship in playwriting, and the Alfred Hodder fellowship at Princeton University.