UL's Ducornet honored by American Academy of Arts and Letters
Rikki Ducornet, UL Writer in Residence has just been chosen as a recipient of the Academy Awards in Literature, given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The American Academy of Arts and Letters is an honor society of 250 architects, composers, artists, and writers. The honor of election is considered the highest formal recognition of artistic merit in the United States. Every year, the Academy recognizes artists with monetary awards designed to foster and sustain interest in literature, music and the fine arts. Ducornet was one of eight recipients of a $7500 award for her creative work.
“I’m astonished and delighted,” Ducornet says. “It’s such a lonely job to write books. I write books that are very strange. To have anyone respond to them is delightful.” Ducornet says she had no idea the Academy was considering her. The Academy was founded in 1898, with a distinguished membership which included William Dean Howells and Mark Twain. There has been an unbroken chain of artists as members ever since. This year, writers Robert A. Caro and Calvin Trillin join the ranks.
Ducornet is the author of seven novels including The Fan Maker’s Inquisition and The Jade Cabinet. She was also the inspiration for the Steely Dan hit “Rikki don’t lose that number.” She says she was a young faculty wife at Bard College where Donald Fagan was a student. The band was already performing, she was a fan, and “one day, Donald gave me his number. Nothing happened,” she adds. She left the country with her husband and 10 years later walked into a record shop and found her name on the Pretzel Logic album. Ducornet is listed in this month’s More Magazine in an article titled “I was the girl in the song.”
David Calhoun and Elizabeth “EB” Brooks are the first two employees of Lafayette Central Park Inc., the nonprofit charged with turning Lafayette Consolidated Government’s 100-acre Johnston Street Horse Farm property into a passive public park. Calhoun was named executive director, and Brooks is director of planning and design.
There will soon be a whole lot of shakin’ going on at Benny’s Sportshack Supplement Depot, a new concept by Opelousas native Benny Nele. Located at 2002 Johnston St., the supplement shop, smoothie bar and café, featuring hot off the press paninis and wraps, plans to open in late May.
This year’s Cool Town issue is all about people who are not native to South Louisiana but made a conscious decision to be here, to be among us, to participate in our culture and contribute to it.
A shelved ordinance transferring $200,000 from a northside drainage project to a south Lafayette development may not break any laws, but it stinks to high heaven.
An effort to restore a shuttered dancehall and document other vacant or razed honky-tonks could serve as a model for saving an endangered species of entertainment.
Lafayette’s gene pool has been host to a long line of eccentric characters who have blurred the lines between crazy, genius, disturbed and curiously entertaining.
Subscribe to this comment's feed