Members of Bennington College Community Receive Almost 20 Percent of the Honors Awarded by Academy of Arts & Letters

Of the 17 honors it is bestowing this year, the Academy of Arts and Letters is recognizing three members of the Bennington College community for accomplishment in their field. Poet Stephen Sandy, a member of Bennington’s literature faculty from 1969-2002, is being honored with an Academy Award in Literature, one of the highest prizes awarded by the Academy. Sandy is one of eight recipients to receive this prestigious honor.

'Starting with his first book, Stresses in the Peaceable Kingdom, Stephen Sandy has been exploring border lands between the kingdoms of narrative, meditative lyric, and satiric observation of classical literature and the vernaculars of American experience, with a growing originality,' said the Award Committee of Sandy and his work.

Sandy, who was born in Minnesota and now lives in North Bennington, Vermont, earned his BA from Yale College and his MA and PhD from Harvard University. His books of poetry include Thanksgiving Over The Water, Surface Impressions, and Weathers Permitting, among others. His poems have also appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, The Nation, New Republic, and The New Yorker. Sandy had previously received recognition for his work through a Rockefeller Foundation residency, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and an Ingram Merrill fellowship.

Other writers with ties to the Bennington College community recognized by the Academy’s 2006 Literature Award Program include MFA core faculty member Tom Bissell and former literature and languages faculty member Arturo Vivante. Bissell received a one-year literature residency to the American Academy in Rome for 2006-07 and Vivante, who taught at the College in the 1980s, was honored with the Katherine Anne Porter Award.

The Academy’s 250 members nominate candidates and a rotating committee of writers selects winners among established and emerging writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.