Louise Glück awarded Gold Medal for Poetry
Louise Glück, adjunct professor of English and the Rosenkranz Writer in Residence, has has won the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (AAAL) — one of American culture’s highest honor.
Glück, who edited the Yale Series of Younger Poets 2003-2010, is the author of 10 books of poetry. She has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Yale’s Bollingen Prize for her poetry, as well as the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction. Her book “Vita Nova” won the first annual New Yorker Readers Award. In 2014, she received the National Book Award for her book of poetry, “Faithful and Virtuous Night.”
Since 1909, the AAAL has awarded gold medals for distinguished achievement in several different categories of the arts. Beginning in 1950, the academy has awarded two medals a year in the rotating categories of belles lettres and criticism, and painting; biography and music; fiction and sculpture; history and architecture, including landscape architecture; poetry and music; and drama and graphic art.
The American Academy of Arts and Letters was established in 1898 to “foster, assist, and sustain an interest in literature, music, and the fine arts,” and is chartered by Congress. Founding members include Henry James, Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Vedder, and Woodrow Wilson. Each year, the academy gives approximately $1 million dollars in awards to artists, architects, writers, and composers. It presents exhibitions of art, architecture, and manuscripts, and subsidizes readings and performances of new musicals.
Previous winners of this distinguished honor John Updike, Stephen Sondheim, Joan Didion, Frank Gehry, Harold Bloom, C. Vann Woodward, Leonard Bernstein, Robert Frost, and Edith Wharton.
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