NEW YORK – Sandra Cisneros, one of this year's inductees into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, admits she's been wanting to join for a long time.
“I felt like I was waiting for someone to ask me to dance. I felt like a literary wallflower, because I never got invited,” says Cisneros, whose books include such favorites as “The House on Mango Street” and “Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories.”
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“There are some clubs I don't care to be a part of, but this one I wanted to be in,” she added, noting that such friends as the poet Joy Harjo were already in.
Cisneros is among 11 new core members voted in this year, the academy announced Thursday. Others include travel writer Pico Iyer, poets Marie Howe and Carl Phillips, fiction writer Rick Moody and the current U.S. poet laureate, Arthur Sze, who joins such predecessors as Harjo, Billy Collins and Tracy K. Smith.
Abstract painter Joan Snyder is among the visual artists who will be inducted this spring, along with painter-printmaker Elizabeth Peyton, architect-educator Mónica Ponce de León, artist-filmmaker Alfredo Jaar and photographer Stephen Shore.
“Whether through the built environment, the lens of a camera, the stroke of a brush, or lines of a poetry or prose, these new members have raised attention to an art form,” Academy President Kwame Anthony Appiah said in a statement. “They show what it means to look closely at history, at power, at intimacy, at place. Their work enlarges the cultural record, and we are proud to count them among us.”
The academy also added three artists to its honorary membership, which includes Meryl Streep and Bob Dylan among other U.S. and foreign artists: Russian author-critic Maria Stepanova and Argentine fiction writer Luisa Valenzuela, both prominent critics of their governments, and the painter Marlene Dumas, a native of South Africa who now lives in the Netherlands.
New members will be inducted during a May ceremony at the academy's beaux arts complex in Upper Manhattan. Author Zadie Smith will deliver the keynote speech — the Blashfield Address.
An honor society founded in 1898, the academy is divided into categories for literature, music, art and architecture. It has a core membership of 300, with new members elected by current members to replace vacancies created after one has died (There were no vacancies in music over the past year). Others in the academy range from authors Robert Caro and Louise Erdrich to musicians John Adams and Wynton Marsalis to artists Jasper Johns and Maya Lin.
An academy spokesperson declined to say who nominated Cisneros, citing the organization's policy of confidentiality.
During her interview, Cisneros referred to the recent death of Oscar winner Robert Duvall. She remembered meeting him in the 1990s at an event at the University of North Texas that included tango dancing, a longtime passion of Duvall's. At one point, he invited her to dance. She declined.
“I was too flummoxed to accept,” she says. “People ask me if I regret not agreeing to dance with Duvall. I didn't dance with him, but I don't have any regrets. I was just happy to be asked.”