May 5, 2006
SELINSGROVE, (Pa.) – For the second consecutive year, Susquehanna University has nominated Gary Fincke for the Outstanding Baccalaureate Colleges Professor of the Year Award, presented by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE). Supported by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the award recognizes extraordinary dedication to undergraduate teaching and strives to increase awareness of the importance of undergraduate instruction.
Linda McMillin, professor of history, and provost and dean of faculty, said Fincke’s nomination is “in recognition of the fabulous job he has done with the writing program and the great success he has had in the class room and in his own writing.”
A professor of English and creative writing, Fincke founded Susquehanna’s creative writing program and serves as director of its Writers’ Institute. The program includes a nationally-recognized Visiting Writers Series, a summer writing program for promising high school students, national magazines for both high school writers and undergraduate writers, two campus-based literary magazines and an extensive reading series for SU students. From its inception nine years ago, the writing major has grown to include 98 majors and 15 minors, has been featured in national publications and received more than $600,000 in external grants used to establish endowments for visiting writers, as well as scholarships and literary prizes for student writers.
In his nomination letter to CASE, Susquehanna University President L. Jay Lemons said, “Gary embodies the finest of innovative and creative teaching, dedicated undergraduate student mentoring and programmatic initiative. Gary’s scholarly activities inform his teaching and position him as an outstanding mentor and model for young writers. His energy is unsurpassed and his devotion to the education of Susquehanna University students is of the highest order.”
Fincke has received both of Susquehanna’s highest faculty honors – the Distinguished Teaching Award and the John Horn Award for Distinguished Scholarship and Service. He has published 16 books of poetry, short fiction and non-fiction, nine of which were published in the last nine years. His short story collection, Sorry I Worried You, won the Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction in 2003. That same year, his poetry collection Writing Letters for the Blind won the Ohio State University Press/The Journal Poetry Prize. Fincke has also received the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry magazine, the Rose Lefcowitz Prize from Poet Lore, a PEN Syndicated Fiction Prize, two Pushcart Prizes and seven fellowships for creative writing from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
Fincke’s poems, stories and essays have appeared in such periodicals as Harper's, Newsday, The Paris Review, American Scholar and Doubletake. Most recently, his prize-winning essay “The Canals of Mars” was reprinted in The Pushcart Essays, an anthology of the best nonfiction printed during the first 25 years of the Pushcart Prize volumes, and his new story, “The Blazer Sestina,” won the 2003 George Garrett Fiction Prize.
For more information about Fincke and The Writers’ Institute, go to http://www.susqu.edu/Writers.
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Contact: Victoria Kidd
570-372-4119
#vk/2686#
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