Joanna Scott, associate professor of English, has been named one of five nominees for the 1995 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, a national award for American writers. She was nominated for her first collection of short stories, Various Antidotes.

The nominees were chosen from among 300 novels and short story collections. Various Antidotes, published in 1994 by Henry Holt & Company, tells tales from the curious and eccentric history of science and medicine. Her characters are a mix of real and imagined, including van Leeuwenhoek, Charlotte Corday, and Dorothea Dix. Scott earned a previous nomination for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1991 for her third novel, Arrogance.

The PEN/Faulkner Award is the largest annual juried prize for fiction in the United States. The winner, who will be announced in April, will receive $15,000, and the other four nominees will each receive $5,000.

Other nominees are Frederick Busch (The Children in the Woods: New and Selected Stories), David Guterson (Snow Falling on Cedars), Ursula Hegi (Stones from the River), and Joyce Carol Oates (What I Lived For). All five writers will be honored at a ceremony at the Folger Shakespeare Library at 7 p.m. on Saturday, May 13.