NEWS RELEASE

THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS
ELECTS NINE NEW MEMBERS

Two artists, five writers, and two composers honored

An annual election is held to fill vacancies in the Academy's membership of 250 American artists, architects, writers, and composers. Nominations are first voted on by discipline (Art, including architecture, Literature, Music.) The names of those candidates receiving the highest number of votes are then submitted to the entire membership. The honor of election is considered the highest formal recognition of artistic merit in this country.

Biographies of Newly Elected Members of the Academy

Composer Robert Beaser was born in 1954 in Boston, Massachusetts. He was educated at Yale University and the Yale School of Music. He has studied composition with Jacob Druckman, Toru Takemitsu, and Goffredo Petrassi. He is the artistic adviser to the American Composers Orchestra, and Professor and Chairman of the composition department at the Juilliard School. His principal works include opera: The Food of Love; orchestral: The Seven Deadly Sins, Song of the Bells, Piano Concerto, Double Chorus, Choral Variations, The Heavenly Feast, and Sexigessimal Chorus; chamber music: String Quartet, Shadow and Light, Variations for Flute and Piano, Mountain Songs, Minimal Waltz, Brass Quintet; solo: Trasparenza, Canti Notturni, Notes on a Southern Sky, Landscape with Bells, Shenandoah; vocal: Quicksilver, The Seven Deadly Sins for tenor or baritone and piano, Psalm 119, Songs from the Occasions, A Martial Law Carol, I Dwell in Possibility, The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water, for voice and piano, Psalm 150, and Prayer for Peace.

Artist Lee Bontecou, born in 1931 in Providence, Rhode Island, was educated at the Art Students League and Skowhegan School of Art. She taught art at Brooklyn College until her retirement in 1991. She has had solo exhibitions at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York; Musuem of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Davison Art Center, Middletown, Connecticut. Five decades of her work are the subject of a traveling retrospective, which opened in 2003 at the UCLA Hammer Museum, traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and will finish in September 2004 at MoMA QNS, New York. Her work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Writer Paula Fox was born in New York City, in 1923, and was educated at Columbia University. She has taught periodically at the University of Pennsylvania since 1963. She is the author of six novels: Poor George, Desperate Characters, The Western Coast, The Widow's Children, A Servant's Tale, and The God of Nightmares. She has also written more than twenty books for children, and is the author of a nonfiction book, Borrowed Finery: A Memoir.

Painter Lester Johnson was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1919. He studied at the Chicago Art Institute. He taught painting at Yale University for twenty-five years. He has had solo exhibitions at Sun Gallery, Provincetown, MA; Gimpel & Weitzenhoffer Gallery, Ed Thorp Gallery, Peter Findlay Gallery, and Zabriske Gallery in New York, and the Albert Merola Gallery, Provincetown, MA. He received the Jimmy Ernst Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2003.

Writer Jamaica Kincaid was born in Antigua, in 1949. She studied photography at the New School for Social Research, New York, and attended Franconia College in New Hampshire. She has written six books of fiction: At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, Talk Stories, Mr. Potter, and three books of nonfiction, A Small Place, My Brother, and My Garden. Academy member Edward Hoagland says, ''Kincaid uses plain words in complex ways, toward getting thoughts and feelings that are often as hot as coals to rest coolly on the page.''

Composer Bernard Rands, born in Sheffield, England, in 1934, became a naturalized American citizen in 1983. He attended the University of Wales. He studied composition with Luigi Dallapiccola, composition and conducting with Pierre Boulez and Bruno Maderno, and electronic music with Luciano Berio. He is the Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music at Harvard, where he has taught since 1989. He has composed for musical theater including Ballad 2; Serena, Memo 2B, and Memo 2D. His orchestral work includes Mésalliance; Aum; Canti del Sole; Le Tamborin: Suites 1 & 2; Ceremonial I; Ceremonial II; London Serenade; Bells; Concerto No.1 for cello and orchestra; Fanfare for an Orchestra; and Triple Concerto. Rands' instrumental ensembles include Actions for Six; Expressione IV; Cuaderno; Serenata; String Quartet #2; Fanfare for Brass Quintet; and Concertino. He has also written vocal pieces and instrumental solos.

Poet James Tate was born in 1943 in Kansas City, Missouri. He attended the University of Missouri, Kansas State College, and the University of Iowa. He has taught creative writing at the University of California at Berkeley, and Columbia University. He has been a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, since 1971. Mr. Tate has written more than twenty-five books of poetry including Cages; The Lost Pilot; Camping in the Valley; Row with Your Hair; Shepherds of the Mist; Deaf Girl Playing; Wrong Songs; Absences; Land of Little Sticks; Reckoner; Worshipful Company of Fletchers; The Route as Briefed; and Memoir of the Hawk: Poems. His collection Selected Poems (1991) won a Pulitzer Prize. Mr. Tate has written a novel, Lucky Darryl, and a collection of short stories, Hottentot Ossuary.

Playwright Lanford Wilson was born in Lebanon, Missouri, in 1937, and studied at the University of Chicago and the University of Missouri. He was a founding member, resident, playwright, and director of the Circle Repertory Company, New York City. His many plays include So Long at the Fair, Balm in Gilead, Lemon Sky, The Hot L Baltimore, The Mound Builders, Fifth of July, Talley's Folly, Burn This, Redwood Curtain, Sympathetic Magic, Book of Days and Rain Dance. Talley's Folly won a Pulitzer Prize in 1980.