ARTS INSTITUTE GIVES AWARDS

Eight people, including three Pulitzer Prize winners, won $5,000 awards for “works of distinction” from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

David Mamet, a 1984 Pulitzer winner for the play “Glengarry Glen Ross,” Marsha Norman, who won in 1983 for her play “ ‘night Mother” (now playing at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles) and Robert A. Caro, a 1975 winner for his biography of Robert Moses, received awards.

Other winners in the distinguished works category were novelist Russell Banks, fiction writer Frederick Busch, poet-fiction writer Robert Kelly, nature and fiction writer Barry Lopez and novelist Lore Segal.

The group also handed out nine special awards. The winners were:

--Kenneth Koch, the $5,000 Award of Merit Medal for Poetry.

--Richard Powers, the $5,000 Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award (best American fiction) for his “Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance.”

--Gretel Ehrlich, the $5,000 Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award, for the “quality of her prose style” in her collection of narrative essays, “The Solace of Open Spaces.”

--Gregory Corso, the $5,000 Jean Stein Award for his poetry, which “takes risks in expressing its commitment to the author’s values and vision.”

--Julian Barnes, the $5,000 E.M. Forster Award, given to an English writer for a stay in the United States. Barnes’ latest novel is “Flaubert’s Parrot.”

--Cecile Pineda, the $2,500 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, for her debut novel “Face.”

--Philip Whalen, the $2,500 Morton Dauwen Zabel award, which is given in rotation to poets, fiction writers and critics who demonstrate “progressive, original and experimental tendencies.” Whalen won for his poetry, of which the latest collection is “Heavy Breathing: 1967-1983.”

--C.D. Wright, the $1,500 Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry, awarded annually to an outstanding young poet. Wright’s latest collection is “Further Adventures With You.”

--Richard Kenney, the Rome Fellowship for young writers, based on his first two books of poetry, “The Evolution of a Flightless Bird” and “Orrery.” He receives a year’s residence at the American Academy in Rome.