Arts and letters academy votes in Everett, others

New York, The Gulf Observer: The honors keep coming in for fiction writer-poet Percival Everett.

On Tuesday, Everett was one of 19 new members announced for induction this spring into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the honor society that has included luminaries from Mark Twain to Toni Morrison over the past 120 years.

Everett, the prolific author of the novels “The Trees,” “So Much Blue” and dozens of other works, has been a Pulitzer Prize and Booker Prize finalist in the past two years, is currently a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle fiction award for his novel “Dr. No” and was last year’s recipient of a lifetime achievement prize from the critics circle.

He will join a wide range of writers, musicians, architects, performing artists and visual artists in the academy, along with honorary inductees Francis Ford Coppola and Frances McDormand, and two foreign honorary artists: Chilean poet Cecilia Vicuña and Andrey Kurkov, the Ukrainian novelist and prominent critic of the Russian invasion.

The academy was formed in 1898 and currently has 300 core members. New inductees are voted in by current members and remain in the academy for life. They also help out hand out dozens of awards, with prize money for 2023 expected to top $1 million: Everett himself received a literature prize from the academy in 2003.