Texas Sate University is pleased to celebrate Naomi Nye’s election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the oldest and most esteemed honorary societies in the United States. She is among 252 people chosen by the American Academy this year, and the first ever elected from Texas State.
Nye writes she is “deeply proud to be affiliated with Texas State and the students in Creative Writing.” Nye teaches Masters of Fine Arts graduate student workshops in creative writing and also has open workshops for students interested in writing fiction.
As a poet, novelist and songwriter, Nye has authored or edited more than 30 books, including three novels and 12 collections of poetry. In 2020 she was honored with a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Critics Circle. She has won four Pushcart Prizes, the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize and many notable book and best book citations from the American Library Association. She received the Robert Creeley Award in 2013 and received the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature.
Her collection of poems for young adults, “Honeybee,” won the 2008 Arab American Book Award in the children’s/young adult category. Her novel for children, The Turtle of Oman, was chosen both a Best Book of 2014 by the Horn Book and a 2015 Notable Children’s Book by the American Library Association. Nye was named Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation in 2019 and was awarded the 2019 Lon Tinkle Award by the Texas Institute of Letters. Her most recent books of poetry include, Cast Away: Poems of our times (Greenwillow Books, 2020); The Tiny Journalist (BOA Editions Ltd, 2019); and Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners (2018; Greenwillow Books, HarperCollins).
In 2018 Nye donated her literary papers to The Wittliff Collections at Texas State.
Founded in 1780, the Academy honors exceptional individuals in a variety of fields and convenes these leaders to advance new ideas and address important issues toward the public good. Members include some of the most accomplished voices in the arts and humanities, social policy, education, global affairs, and science and technology. Notable members from the Academy’s history include Margaret Mead, Jonas Salk, Barbara McClintock, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Aaron Copland, Martha Graham, John Hope Franklin, Georgia O’Keeffe, I.M. Pei, and Toni Morrison.
“We are honoring the excellence of these individuals, celebrating what they have achieved so far, and imagining what they will continue to accomplish,” said David Oxtoby, President of the American Academy. “The past year has been replete with evidence of how things can get worse; this is an opportunity to illuminate the importance of art, ideas, knowledge, and leadership that can make a better world.”
John Adams and John Hancock were founding fathers of the Academy along with 60 other scholar-patriots who understood that a new republic would require institutions able to gather knowledge and advance learning in service to the public good.
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