Actress, playwright and educator Anna Deavere Smith, playwright Adrienne Kennedy, and author and essayist Phillip Lopate are among the winners of the American Academy of Arts and Letters career awards.
Lopate, 78, won the Christopher Lightfoot Walker Award of $100,000 for her contributions to American literature. His books include the collections of essays “Bachelor” and “Against Joie de Vivre” and the novels “Confessions of Summer” and “The Rug Merchant”. He has also edited anthologies such as “Writing New York” and “The Art of the Personal Essay”.
The academy announced Tuesday that 90-year-old Kennedy, known for plays such as “Funnyhouse of a Negro” and “Sleep Deprivation Drama”, will be recognized with the Gold Medal for Theatre.
Smith, 71, whose credits range from one-person works such as “Fires in the Mirror” to the television series “The West Wing” and “Nurse Jackie”, will receive the Medal for Spoken Language.
Also on Tuesday, the academy awarded the Distinguished Service to the Arts Award to 61-year-old Edwin Frank, a poet, essayist and founder of the New York Review Books publishing house, which publishes everything from forgotten literature of the past to translated contemporary books. The 52-year-old visual artist Kara Walker, whose silhouettes have been exhibited around the world, will receive a Gold Medal in Graphic Arts.