Jennifer Cognard-Black, professor of English at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, has been chosen for a Maryland State Arts Council (MSAC) Individual Artist Award in Fiction. The award comes with a $3,000 grant to support Cognard-Black’s writing.

The MSAC makes awards to Maryland artists annually through a competitive application process, aimed to promote and support artistic excellence across the state. This year, MSAC awarded individual works in the following categories: fiction; theater: solo performance; visual arts: media/digital/electronic arts; visual arts: painting; and visual arts: works on paper. The awards program is administered by the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation. The formal announcement of the MSAC Individual Artist Awards was made on Thursday, March 21.

Professor Cognard-Black joined the English Department faculty of St. Mary’s College of Maryland in 2000. Her teaching and research interests are in Anglo-American literature of the Victorian period, fiction writing, women writers, and the literatures of food. A selection of her publications includes “Narrative in the Professional Age” (Routledge, 2004); “Advancing Rhetoric” (Kendall/Hunt, 2004); and “Kindred Hands: Letters on Writing” (Iowa Press, 2006). A 2012 Fulbright Scholar to Slovenia, she is also a regular contributor to Ms. Magazine. Under the pseudonym J. Annie MacLeod, she publishes short fiction. Her stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and have been featured in publications from Another Chicago Magazine to Versal to Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Her anthology of food literature, “Books that Cook: The Making of a Literary Meal,” co-edited with Melissa Goldthwaite, is forthcoming from New York University Press in the spring of 2014.

Cognard-Black holds a B.A. from Nebraska Wesleyan University, an M.A. from Iowa State University, and a Ph.D. from The Ohio State University.