SELINSGROVE, Pa. - Dr. Gary Fincke, professor of English at Susquehanna University, is one of 84 individual Pennsylvania artists to receive a 2000 Fellowship Award from the Pennsylvania Arts Council.

Individual artist fellowship awards are made annually in selected categories. This year's include dance, folk and traditional arts, interdisciplinary arts, literature, media arts, music, theater and visual arts. The awards are intended to recongnize artistic excellence and encourage Pennsylvania creative artists of all backgrounds and heritages to make their work accessible to the public. Fincke received a $5,000 award to provide support for his artistic achievements in the field of literature.

The author of nine books of poetry, Fincke has won numerous awards including the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry, the Rose Lefcowitz Prize from Poet Lore, and a Pushcart Prize in poetry for work originally published in Oxford Magazine. He has also been awarded five literary fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts for his poetry and fiction.

His poems and stories have appeared in Harper's, Newsday, The Philadelphia Inquirer, DoubleTake, The Paris Review, and American Scholar. Fincke also authors newspaper articles reflecting on issues in our daily lives that are distributed by Scripps-Howard. They have appeared in newspapers across the country including the Atlanta Constitution, the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, the Sacramento Bee, and the electronic newspaper Nando News.

Fincke is the director of the Writers' Institute and professor of English at Susquehanna University, a private selective liberal arts university located in Selinsgrove, Pa.

The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts is a state agency under the Governor's Office. Its mission is to foster the excellence, diversity and vitality of the arts in Pennsylvania, and to broaden the availablity and appreciation of those arts throughout the state.

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