POET CHARLES WRIGHT ELECTED TO
 AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS

	CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., April 13 -- University of Virginia
English professor Charles Wright, one of America's foremost poets,
has been elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and
Letters, an honor widely considered the highest formal recognition
of artistic merit in the country.
	Wright, who has taught poetry at U.Va. since 1983 and is the
author of more than a dozen books, is one of 10 new academy members
elected for 1995.  Others chosen were fellow poets James Laughlin
and Charles Simic, writers Brendan Gill, Murray Kempton and Garry
Wills, satirist-cartoonist Jules Feiffer, sculptor Richard Serra,
playwright August Wilson and composer Olly Wilson.
	New members are elected annually to fill vacancies in the
academy's membership of 250 prominent artists, architects, writers
and composers.  Election is through voting of current members.
	The American Academy of Arts and Letters, chartered by
Congress and headquartered in New York, was established in 1898 to
"foster, assist and sustain an interest in literature, music and the
fine arts."  Over the years there have been approximately 1,200
members, beginning with a roster that included such great American
literary figures as Henry Adams, William James, Henry James and Mark
Twain.
	Former U.Va. English professor and fiction writer Peter
Taylor, who died last year, was a member of the academy.  Novelist
Ann Beattie, who lives in Charlottesville and has been a visiting
English department faculty member at U.Va., is also a member of the
academy.
	Wright's poetry has been widely acclaimed for what fellow
academy member Mark Strand has described as "long, lushly figured
sequences; part autobiography, part cultural commentary."  Wright's
most recent book is "Chickamauga," published this spring by Farrar,
Straus & Giroux.
	Born in Pickwick Dam, Tenn., in 1935, Wright is a frequent
contributor to such periodicals as The American Poetry Review, The
Nation and The New Yorker.  Among his books are "Hard Freight,"
"Bloodlines," "China Trace," "The Southern Cross," "Country Music:
Selected Early Poems," "Zone Journals" and "The World of the Ten
Thousand Things."  He is also regarded as an outstanding teacher of
poetry.
	His many awards include a PEN Translation Prize for
translations of the Italian poetry of Eugenio Montale, the Edgar
Allen Poe Award from the Academy of American Poets, an American
Academy of Arts and Letters Award and the organization's Award of
Merit Medal for Poetry, the 1983 American Book Award for Poetry for
"Country Music," and, in 1993, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for
lifetime achievement in poetry.
	Wright and the other newest members will be officially
inducted at the academy's annual ceremony May 17 in New York.
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April 12, 1995