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Jennifer Cognard-Black Named a 2022 Independent Artist Award Recipient by Maryland State Arts Council

Jennifer Cognard-Black, professor of English and 2020 recipient of the Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching, is a 2022 recipient of an Independent Artist Award presented by the Maryland State Arts Council. Cognard-Black will receive a $2,000 regional grant to recognize promise in fiction writing. This is her second Maryland State Arts Council Award; she received her first in 2013.

Cognard-Black says of this award, “While the Individual Artist Awards honor past writing – in this case, two of my short stories – what I appreciate most is how these awards support artists as they move toward their creative futures. For me, that’s a novel I’m writing fictionalizing part of the life of the novelist Edith Wharton against the backdrop of World War I, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Photo-Secessionist movement. To know that members of MSAC find promise in my current work helps give me energy towards its completion.”

One of her award-winning short stories is included in the forthcoming issue of SlackWater, an occasional journal published by St. Mary’s College of Maryland, featuring the work of faculty, students and members of the Southern Maryland community.

This year’s 69 awardees were chosen from a pool of nearly 300 applicants through a public panel process. With this year’s awards focused on the literary arts, the 2022 awardees represent a wide range of artistic talents – ranging from poets to playwrights, novelists to essayists – from all across the state. Click here for the full list of winners.

St. Mary’s College Professor to Teach in Amsterdam via Prestigious Fulbright Grant

A St. Mary’s College of Maryland professor has received a Fulbright Scholar grant for research and teaching abroad.

Jennifer Cognard-Black, professor of English and current chair of the English department, has been selected for a Fulbright grant for the spring semester of the 2019-2020 academic year. This award is for a “Senior Professorship in American Culture.” She will be teaching a special topics seminar for master’s degree students at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) in Literary Food Studies, titled “Just Food: American Food Writing and Social Justice,” as well as taking over part of a core course on literary practice and holding a workshop for PhD students that instructs them on ways to integrate teaching with research.  She also intends to conduct a research project in which she will ultimately produce an anthology titled “Recipes for Social Justice: Transatlantic Essays on Ethical Eating.”

Cognard-Black is familiar with the Fulbright grant. She joins SMCM faculty Robin Bates, Bruce Wilson, and Charles Musgrove as one of a select few SMCM professors to receive two Fulbright awards. The first took her to Slovenia in 2012, working with students that she still has ongoing relationships with today. “I am honored to have a chance once again to be an educator-ambassador on behalf of the United States and of our college,” Cognard-Black said. “This Fulbright award is an incredible opportunity to share American literature and pedagogy with students and colleagues in another country, but it’s also an opportunity for me to expand my own thinking on food justice issues and concerns in a global context.” Cognard-Black hopes to build on the work she began in Slovenia, by continuing to foster connections between St. Mary’s College and the global community. Over the course of the 2020 semester, she plans to find meaningful and lasting ways to bring the SMCM and UvA communities together.

“Yet publication will not be the sole means of sharing this work,” she explains. For instance, Cognard-Black plans to host a student panel on Food, Power, and Culture at the yearly conference hosted by PhD students at UvA, an event that draws graduate students from around the globe. She also hopes to give her students at UvA the chance to share their work in a broader sense, and to have them collaborate with students here in the U.S. “For one of the key reasons to analyze food and foodways is to enrich others’ understanding of worldwide food disparities, economies, and cultural identities,” Cognard-Black explains, “and sharing essays on ethical eating practices may help student participants both recognize and resist the barriers between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ thereby promoting culinary empathy across borders.”

St. Mary’s College of Maryland is accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education through 2024-2025. St. Mary’s College, designated the Maryland state honors college in 1992, is ranked one of the best public liberal arts schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Approximately 1,600 students attend the college, nestled on the St. Mary’s River in Southern Maryland.

Written by St. Mary’s College student Zoe Smedley ’19