Hempel Inducted into American Academy of Arts and Letters
MFA faculty member Amy Hempel is one of 14 new members to be elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
The 2017 inductees, who also include Junot Diaz, Ann Patchett, Colum McCann, and former U.S. poet laureate Kay Ryan, will be formally welcomed at a ceremony at the New York-based Academy in May, where member Joyce Carol Oates will deliver the centennial Blashfield Foundation keynote address. The Academy was founded in 1898 as an honor society of the country’s leading architects, artists, composers, and writers.
A recipient of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the United States Artists Foundation, and the Academy of Arts and Letters, Hempel is the author of Reasons to Live, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, Tumble Home, and The Dog of the Marriage, and is co-editor of Unleashed. Her stories have appeared in Harper's, GQ, Vanity Fair, and many other publications, and have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Her Collected Stories was named by The New York Times as one of the ten best books of 2007, and won the Ambassador Book Award for best fiction of the year. In 2008 she received the REA Award for the Short Story, and in 2009 she received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story.