For college graduates facing the prospect of repaying enormous student loans, a prize of $55,907 is hardly chump change. Just ask Marshall Shord, a 2006 graduate of Washington College in Chestertown, Md.
At his graduation ceremony in May 2006, the English major from Berlin, Md. received the Sophie Kerr Prize – the largest undergraduate literary award in the country – for his portfolio of essays, stories and poems and critical thesis on Thomas Pynchon’s novels. The competition is held annually to honor the college’s graduating senior who demonstrates the greatest “ability and promise for future fulfillment in the field of literary endeavor.”
Washington College has awarded more than $1 million in prize money since the award was first given in 1968, most often to writers of poetry and fiction. In selecting Shord, the Sophie Kerr Committee was impressed with his creative writing and poetry. The Committee noted that Marshall’s work imitated the methods of the “high-modernist master James Joyce” in very original ways, and Shord’s thesis advisor, Professor Thomas Cousineau, even went so far as to call Shord’s examination of Pynchon’s novels “one of the best theses he had ever seen.”
To learn more, visit: https://www.washcoll.edu/departments/english/sophie-kerr-legacy/.
