This just is from the Associated Press:

NEW YORK - Historian Robert Caro, humorist Calvin Trillin and poet Paul Muldoon will be among the eight new members inducted next month into the elite American Academy of Arts and Letters, (see the official seal and motto above) the academy announced Tuesday.

Some of the new members have ties to Madison.

Caro, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, is known for his biography of Robert Moses, "The Power Broker," and for his multivolume series on Lyndon Johnson. Trillin is a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker who writes often about food and last year released a best-selling memoir about his late wife, Alice Trillin.

The Irish-born Muldoon (at right), who teaches at Princeton and is the poetry editor of The New Yorker, won a Pulitzer in 2003 for "Moy Sand and Gravel." He was also the librettist for the "Shining Brow," an acclaimed opera by Daron Hagen about Frank Lloyd Wright commissioned and given its world premiere by the Madison Opera in 1993.

Other inductees include fiction writer-essayist Joy Williams, artists Ursula von Rydingsvard (whose large, rough-hewn wooden sculpture - see an example below at right) is near the main entrance of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in the Overture Center) and John Baldessari, African scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah and Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt. Gold medals for lifetime achievement will be presented to historian Edmund S. Morgan and architect Richard Meier.

Previous medal winners include Frank Gehry, Edith Wharton and Leonard Bernstein.

Founded in 1898, the academy is "an honor society of 250 architects, composers, artists, and writers," according to its Web site, with new members voted in as "vacancies occur." The academy's goal is to "foster, assist, and sustain excellence" in the arts.

For more information, check the Net: www.artsandletters.org

Are there other Madison ties Art Talk isn't aware of?

Do you know the new members' work? What do you think of it?

What other local figures do you think should be members of the American Academy?