News Release

The American Academy of Arts and Letters has bestowed one of eight 2006 Academy Awards in Literature on Michael Fried, the J.R. Herbert Boone Professor in the Humanities at the Krieger School of Arts and Science at The Johns Hopkins University.

The awards, each of which includes a prize of $7,500, honor writers of exceptional accomplishment in any genre. Fried, who holds joint appointments in the Humanities Center and the Department of the History of Art, has written books about 18th- and 19th-century painting and literature, including Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (1987); Courbet's Realism (1990); and Manet's Modernism, or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (1996). He has also written a collection of criticism of contemporary art, as well as three books of poetry, the latest of which is The Next Bend in the Road (2004).

Fried previously received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities, and, in 2004, he received a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The awards will be presented on May 17 in New York at the academy's annual ceremony. The academy, whose mission is to "foster, assist and sustain an interest in literature, music and the fine arts," consists of 250 writers, composers, painters, sculptors and architects. Each year, members nominate candidates for the literature prizes, and a rotating committee of writers selects winners. This year's committee included Edward Hoagland, John Hollander, Romulus Linney, Janet Malcolm, Grace Paley, Reynolds Price and William Jay Smith. Information is available at www.artsandletters.org/.

A photo of Fried is available by e-mailing amylunday@jhu.edu.