KAHLIL GIBRAN (1923-2008) Visual Arts Staff 1969. Sculptor, painter, inventor and writer, named for his renowned cousin, author of The Prophet, whom he called "a horizon to me."

MIRIAM GOODMAN (1939-2008) Poetry Fellow 1970, 1971. Author of four books: Permanent Wave, 1977; Signal:: Noise, 1982; Expense Report, 1995, and Commercial Traveler, 1995.

JASON SCOTT SHINDER (1956-2008) Poetry Fellow 1978. Author of two books, Every Room We Ever Slept In, 1993, and Among Women, 2001. Editor of anthologies, including Divided Light: Father and Son Poems, 1983; Lights, Camera, Poetry! American Movie Poems, the First Hundred Years, 1996; Tales from the Couch: Writers on Talk Therapy, 2000, and The Poem That Changed America: 'Howl' Fifty Years Later, 2006.

Jason was director of arts and humanities for the Y.M.C.A. of the U.S.A., the Y's national organization. He had founded its programs in the 1990s. Along with the Writer's Voice, it has a range of offerings for children and adults in the visual and performing arts.

He launched the original Writer's Voice in 1981, at the West Side Y, in Manhattan. It offered high-level instruction in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing at far less than the cost of a graduate writing program, and held readings by distinguished authors. Jason expanded the Voice into a national program in 1990, now offered at more than two dozen Y.M.C.A.'s nationwide.

GELSEY VERNA (1961-2008) Visual Arts Fellow 1997. Born in Haiti, Canadian citizen, professor of painting at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

TONY VEVERS (1927-2008) Early Visual Arts Staff. A painter self-described as "enraptured by nature." Founding member of the Long Point Gallery in 1977, serving as its President from 1988, when he moved to Provincetown year-round, until it closed in 1998. Historian of the Provincetown art world. He leaves his wife, Elspeth Halvorsen, and daughters, Tabitha, a Visual Arts Fellow in 1995, and Stephanie, all artists.

ARTURO VIVANTE (1924-2008) Writing Staff, early 70s. Born in Rome. Prolific author of five collections of stories, seventy of which first appeared in the New Yorker; three novels; a book of essays on fiction writing; an Englished anthology of Italian poetry from its beginnings to 1970; plays; and Poesie, his first book, published in Venice in 1951.

— Roger Skillings