Poet John Ashbery will receive the 2011 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the 62nd National Book Awards set for Wednesday, November 16 in New York City. Also that evening, Mitchell Kaplan, bookseller and co-founder of the Miami International Book Fair, will receive the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community. Actor, writer, and musician John Lithgow will host the event.
Ashbery is the twenty-first recipient of the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, which was established to recognize a lifetime of literary achievement. Previous recipients include Toni Morrison, John Updike, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gore Vidal, and Tom Wolfe. Ashbery won the Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, which also won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
This year's ceremony marks the seventh year that the Foundation has presented the Literarian Award, which was established to recognize an individual whose work has enhanced the literary world during a lifetime of service. In addition to his role in the Miami Book Fair, Kaplan is the owner of Books & Books, which has five bookstores, and he serves on the steering committee of the Florida Center for the Literary Arts, Miami-Dade College's literary center. Kaplan has served as president of the American Booksellers Association, and on the board of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression. Previous recipients include Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein, Terry Gross, Barney Rosset, Dave Eggers, and Joan Ganz Cooney.
