By Larry Keough

FSU Communications Group

An FSU English professor -- often called a "Renaissance woman" because she is a novelist, teacher, playwright, columnist and critic -- has won FSU's highest faculty honor.

Janet G. Burroway, 58, an FSU faculty member for 23 years, received the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor award at FSU's spring commencement April 28.

The award is a tribute to Burroway's eclectic prowess as a teacher, scholar, author of seven novels, NBC Special Fellow in Playwrighting at the Yale School of Drama, critic for the New York Times Book Review and columnist for the literary magazine New Letters.

Burroway's 1977 novel, "Raw Silk," was nominated for the National Book Award, and her novel, "The Buzzards," was a Pulitzer prize nominee.

Burroway is at work on her eighth novel -- a story set in a South Georgia mill town -- and the fourth edition of her textbook, "Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft," which is used in more than 300 U.S. universities and colleges.

She has also published literary critiques, essays, short stories, two children's stories and two books of poetry.

In 1993, she completed a full-length play, "Medea With Child." She's working on another, "Parts of Speech," which was inspired by her mother, an elocution teacher. Burroway has collaborated with FSU Professor Lynda Davis, composer Ray Brooks and the FSU dance department in the production of "Text Tile" and "The Empty Dress."

She and FSU Professor Charles Olsen are adapting her novel, "Opening Nights," for radio programming.

Burroway also has won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and was a visiting lecturer at the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1980.

Burroway is the wife of FSU German and film studies Professor Peter Ruppert, mother of two grown sons and an 8-year-old stepdaughter.

The Phoenix-born writer graduated cum laude from Barnard College in New York and with first-class honors from Cambridge University in England, where she was a Marshall Scholar.