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Scholarship Honors William Warner
During his urban boyhood, William Warner hardly guessed he'd grow up to chronicle the lives of the blue crab and the men who stalk them, take to the Atlantic in factory fishing ships or reminisce in print about coral reefs and fossils. Chronicle, fish and reminisce he has, and won honors for the effort to boot. To honor his outstanding contributions in the literary genre of nature writing, friends of Washington College have established a scholarship in his name.
The scholarship will be awarded to the junior who shows an aptitude for writing about nature and the environment. To encourage promising writers, preference will be given to those who write primarily about the natural history of the Atlantic Littoral, from the Canadian Arctic to the Gulf of Florida.
College President John S. Toll said, "William Warner is one of the most distinguished writers on the Eastern Shore, in the state of Maryland and across the nation. The Warner Scholarship will assist worthy students who may one day follow in his footsteps."
Warner has been a Senior Fellow at the College since 1985, when he was honored for his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay, published in 1976. Novelist Larry McMurtry wrote, "The prose of Beautiful Swimmers has grace, wit and clarity, on top of a real strength of feeling; were one not inclined to read the book to find out about crabs and watermen, one would still read it merely for its sentences."
Warner went on to write Distant Water: The Fate of the North Atlantic Fisherman, in which he studied the ocean-going factory fishing ships that plied, and some would say, pillaged the North Atlantic. In 1999 Warner published Into the Porcupine Cave and Other Odysseys. In this book of ten essays, Warner recounts ten life-shaping events in his growth as a naturalist, from wanderings in the wild with his step-grandfather to adventures in Patagonia and Hawaii. He received the Washington College Literary Prize in April of that year. Warner has also written a dozen articles on nature for such journals as The Wilson Quarterly, Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times and Atlantic Naturalist.
The first William Warner Scholarship will be awarded in the next academic year.
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