Wenke Recipient of $6,000 Maryland State Arts Council Award

SALISBURY, MD---Dr. John Wenke, professor of English at Salisbury State University, has won the largest single award given in fiction writing this year by the Maryland State Arts Council. Wenke received a $6,000 Individual Artist Award, the maximum, for his short story, "Choke Hold."

He was the only writer throughout Maryland to receive this amount. Seventeen other authors were acknowledged with grants ranging from $1,000 to $3,000. Selections, based on artistic excellence, were made anonymously by three judges from outside of Maryland.

Wenke, a nationally recognized scholar in American literature and Melville studies, is also gaining a reputation as a fiction writer. His short stories have appeared in Writers' Forum, Chariton Review, Cimarron Review, North Atlantic Review and Chesapeake East.

He is the author of two books, J.D. Salinger (1991) and Melville's Muse (1995), as well as numerous essays and reviews. An officer in the internationally recognized Melville Society, for five years he reviewed all Melville scholarship of the previous year for the annual American Literary Scholarship, published by Duke University Press.

Wenke won SSU's Distinguished Faculty Award in 1990 and 1997.