Finalists for 2012 Sophie Kerr Prize Announced

Congratulations to the 2012 Finalists: seated, Doug Carter, Maria  Queen, Katie Manion; standing,  Erica Walburg and Natalie Butz.

 * Read Portfolio Excerpts * 

* More about Sophie Kerr *

CHESTERTOWN, MD—Washington College has named five finalists for the famous Sophie Kerr Prize, the largest undergraduate literary prize in the nation, this year valued at more than $58,000.  They are:

Natalie Butz, an English major from Falls Church, Va., who minors in History, Psychology and Creative Writing.  In her four years in Chestertown, Butz has served as Editor-in-Chief of the student newspaper, The Elm, worked in the Writing Center, participated in drama productions, joined the Douglass Cater Society of Junior Fellows, and achieved distinction as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She traveled to Tanzania as part of the College’s summer program there, spent a semester studying in Ireland and worked in New York as an intern at Folio Literary Management. Her writing portfolio includes excerpts from a historical novel-in-progress, short stories, and articles published in The Elm, the Chestertown Spy and Washington College Magazine. “Her creative work is distinctive for its commitment to research, and she tackles difficult topics such as race, class and gender with real honesty,” judges from the Sophie Kerr Committee said of her portfolio.

Douglas S. Carter, Jr., an English and Art History double major with a minor in Creative Writing who hails from Pasadena, Md. A member of Phi Beta Kappa, Carter has volunteered in New Zealand through Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WOOF) and, as a Douglass Cater Fellow, hiked the mountain ranges of Northern England and Southern Ireland on Professor Richard Gillin’s Kiplin Hall trip. His writing portfolio includes poems, short non-fiction, scholarly writing and a travel essay. “Doug’s portfolio is defined by a passionate interest in literature and the arts and an engagement with social issues, especially environmental stewardship,” said one judge. “He is optimistic and believes in the power of the arts to do good in the world. He establishes an intimacy with the readers, and his intellectually cordial personality shows through.” Local residents may know Doug through his work as a barista at Sam’s coffee shop and a server at the Chester River Yacht and Country Club. After graduation, he will intern for the new vineyard and winery at Crow Farm, a B & B and grass-fed beef farm in Kennedyville, Md.

Kathryn Manion, a resident of Clarksville, Md., who majors in English with minors in Creative Writing and Anthropology. Involved with many on-campus publications, Manion  has worked as a consultant at the Writing Center and served as head of the Writers’ Union for the past two years. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the Douglass Cater Society of Junior Fellows, and the English and Anthropology honor societies. Her writing portfolio included short stories and an excerpt from her senior thesis on letter-writing in novels. The judging committee described Manion as a mature, focused student whose scholarship and fiction both display an intensity of purpose. “Her fiction shows flashes of brilliance through her ability to create voice keenly appropriate to the story in progress. Both on the page and as a member of this community, Katie has a quiet confidence in her ability to lead, write and edit,” they added. This summer, Manion will attend the University of Denver Publishing Institute’s prestigious program in writing and editing.

Maria Noelle Queen, a Humanities major and Creative Writing minor from Hagerstown, Md. Queen, a member of Phi Beta Kappa, submitted 18 pages of poetry to the Sophie Kerr Committee, much of it focused on the relationship between a daughter and her parents.  “Her poetry is at times very funny and at times very sad, and it manages to be both extremely personal and yet objective about how she sees herself in the world,” said one committee member. “She has a well defined voice for a young writer and manages that difficult balance between subjective and objective very well.” An avid gamer, Queen hopes to work as a writer for a video game production company such as Bethesda or Bioware, developing plot, characters and dialog.

Erica Walburg, a double major in English and Studio Art from Pewaukee, Wis., who minors in Creative Writing. Walburg is a member of the Douglass Cater Society of Junior Fellows and the Sigma Tau Delta English Honors Society and has been involved in myriad campus activities, including acting in drama productions, singing with the Vocal Consort, serving as Vice President of the Writers’ Union, and editing the Washington College Review, an annual liberal arts journal. She also interned for a summer at The American Scholar, the magazine published by Phi Beta Kappa. Walburg’s portfolio includes parts of a novel, poetry and her thesis on the history and evolution of the graphic novel, which incorporates her research on Aristotle and Pulitzer-Prize winning graphic novelist Art Spiegelman. “Erica’s work reflects her Midwestern roots and her interest in the marriage of the verbal and the visual,” the committee said of her writing. “As she says in the introduction to her portfolio, she wants to return words to their basic function as visual symbols.” 

The five finalists, all graduating seniors who submitted portfolios of their writing to be judged, will travel to New York City for a special program and reception on May 15. There, in a private club in midtown Manhattan, they will read selections from their portfolios and then hold their breath as internationally renowned novelist Colum McCann opens an envelope and announces the winner. The entire program will be livestreamed through the Washington College Web site (www.washcoll.edu) beginning at 6:30 p.m.

The actual check, in the amount of $58,274.11, will be awarded during Washington College’s 229th commencement on Sunday morning, May 20.

A total of 35 seniors applied for the Prize, and they represented a mix of disciplines—not only the expected English majors and Creative Writing minors, but also 15 other majors that included Physics, Philosophy, Business Management, Art and International Relations. The finalists and the eventual winner were selected by members of the Sophie Kerr Committee — the 13 full-time members of the English faculty plus the College president. Committee chair Kathryn Moncrief, chair of the English Department, says this was a strong year for student writing. “This year’s portfolios were remarkable for the scope of their concerns and topics and the depth with which they handled them,” she elaborated. “We could easily have doubled the number of finalists we selected.”

This is only the second time in the 45-year history of the prize that the Sophie Kerr Committee has named finalists. In the past, the name of the single recipient was announced during Commencement, but the names of those who came close remained a secret the committee members vowed not to disclose.

This is also the second year that author McCann, whose novel Let the Great World Spin won the 2009 National Book Award and the 2011 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, will offer keynote remarks and announce the winner.

In holding the announcement ceremony in New York, the College acknowledges the importance of the city as the literary capital of the world and the personal journey of Prize benefactor Sophie Kerr.  A native of Denton, Md., Kerr moved to New York as a young woman and built a successful 40-year career as national magazine editor and writer. Her townhouse on East 38^th Street became a literary salon for her friends in journalism and the arts. At her death, she bequeathed much of her estate to Washington College, with the stipulation that half its income would be awarded annually to the senior showing “the most ability and promise for future fulfillment in the field of literary endeavor.”

The other half of the endowment brings a steady stream of notable writers, authors and editors to campus for readings and workshops, provides scholarships for students who show literary promise, pays for library books, and supports various other literary activities.

Washington College Announces Finalists for $50,000 George Washington Book Prize

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CHESTERTOWN, MD, Feb. 22, 2012—Since his birth 280 years ago today, George Washington has received no small amount of attention from authors and publishers. The Library of Congress catalogue lists almost 1,200 books about the Father of Our Country, including more than 100 full-scale biographies, 60 volumes of letters and diaries, and entire works on topics such as Washington's teeth, a chair he once owned, and his rescue of a British general's stray dog in 1777. Countless more books have been published about the Revolutionary era on which he made his mark.

Each year, however, the George Washington Book Prize honors – with a $50,000 award – a single recent work on Washington or his times that stands above the others. In honor of George Washington's Birthday, Washington College announces the three finalists for the 2012 prize.

The honored books, all of them published in 2011, are John Fea's Was America Founded As A Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction (Westminster John Knox Press), Benjamin H. Irvin's Clothed in Robes of Sovereignty: The Continental Congress and the People Out of Doors, (Oxford University Press), and Maya Jasanoff's Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (Knopf).

The award—which is co-sponsored by Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and George Washington's Mount Vernon—recognizes the past year's best books on the nation's founding era, especially those that have the potential to advance broad public understanding of American history.

"This prize is, of course, about history that happened 200 years ago, but it's also about the present," says Adam Goodheart, Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of Washington College's C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, which administers the prize. "From the Tea Party movement to this year's presidential debates, Americans still refer to the nation's founding era when they talk about current events. This year's finalists reflect on some of these enduring questions, including the role of religion in politics, the relationship between politicians and the general public, and the fate of dissident minorities."

The winner of the $50,000 prize will be announced June 4 at a black-tie dinner at George Washington's Mount Vernon Estate & Gardens in Virginia.

This year's finalists were selected by a jury of three distinguished historians: Richard Beeman, the John Welsh Centennial Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and the 2010 winner of the George Washington Book Prize, who served as chair; Thomas Fleming, distinguished historian and author; and Marla R. Miller of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. They selected the finalists after reviewing nearly 50 books published last year on the founding period in American history, from about 1760 to 1820, the time of the creation and consolidation of the young republic.

In John Fea's Was America Founded As A Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction, the author asks – and answers – one of the most controversial questions of contemporary public debate. The jury praised the book for its "balance and nuance" and "real, even pressing, contemporary importance." Fea is Associate Professor of American History and Chair of the History Department at Messiah College in Grantham, Pa., and has written extensively for both scholarly and popular audiences. He is also the author of The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America and co-editor of Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian's Vocation.

Benjamin H. Irvin's Clothed in Robes of Sovereignty: The Continental Congress and the People Out of Doors, is, in the jury's words, a "well-researched and imaginatively conceived work" that "provides a lively narrative and a fascinating window onto the relationship between America's political leaders in the Congress and the people." Irvin is Associate Professor of History at the University of Arizona. He has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania, where he held an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. He is the author of the young adult biography, Samuel Adams: Son of Liberty, Father of Revolution.

In praising Maya Jasanoff's Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World, the jury applauded the book's "impressive archival research, its sweeping conceptualization, perspectives and aims, its enviable prose style and the penetrating insights it yields into its characters' lives." Jasanoff was educated at Harvard, Cambridge, and Yale, and is currently Associate Professor of History at Harvard University. Her first book, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850, was awarded the 2005 Duff Cooper Prize and was a book of the year selection in numerous publications, including The Economist, The Observer, and The Sunday Times. She has contributed essays to The London Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, and other publications. Liberty's Exiles is also a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction.

More information about the George Washington Book Prize is at gwprize.washcoll.edu.

The 2012 George Washington Book Prize Jurors

Richard Beeman, chair, is one of the nation’s leading historians of America’s revolutionary and early national experience. He has been a member of the faculty at University of Pennsylvania for 43 years and has served as Chair of the Department of History and as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. He is a member of the scholarly advisory board of the American Revolution Center and the Board of Trustees of the National Constitution Center. His book Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution was the winner of the 2010 George Washington Book Prize. He is also the author of five other books on revolutionary America, including The Penguin Guide to the American Constitution and Patrick Henry: A Biography, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Beeman is a senior fellow of Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.

Thomas Fleming has written 20 non-fiction books that have won prizes and praise from critics and fellow historians, many with a special focus on the American Revolution. His 23 novels explore the lives of men and women in vivid narratives that range from the raw America of the 1730s to the superpower that confronted World War II and endured Korea and Vietnam. He has written frequently for American Heritage and many other magazines and is a frequent guest on C-Span, The History Channel and PBS. His books include Liberty!: The American Revolution, Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the Future of America, Washington’s Secret War: The Hidden History of Valley Forge, and The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers.

Marla R. Miller is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Public History Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her book The Needle’s Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution (University of Massachusetts Press 2006) won the Costume Society of America’s Millia Davenport Publication Award for the best book in the field for that year. Her most recent book, Betsy Ross and the Making of America, a scholarly biography of that much-misunderstood early American craftswoman, was a finalist for the Cundill Prize in History at McGill University and was named to the Washington Post’s “Best of 2010” list. She has won the Organization of American Historians’ Lerner-Scott Prize and the Walter Muir Whitehill Prize in Colonial History.

Sponsors of the George Washington Book Prize

Washington College was founded in 1782, the first institution of higher learning established in the new republic. George Washington was not only a principal donor to the college, but also a member of its original governing board. He received an honorary degree from the college in June 1789, two months after assuming the presidency. The C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, founded in 2000, is an innovative center for the study of history, culture and politics, and fosters excellence in the art of written history through fellowships, prizes, and student programs. www.washcoll.edu

Founded in 1994, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History promotes the study and love of American history. The Institute serves teachers, students, scholars, and the general public. It helps create history-centered schools, organizes seminars and programs for educators, produces print and electronic publications and traveling exhibitions, sponsors lectures by eminent historians, and administers a History Teacher of the Year Award in every state. The Institute also awards the Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and George Washington Book Prizes, and offers fellowships for scholars to work in the Gilder Lehrman Collection. The Institute maintains two websites, http://www.gilderlehrman.org and the quarterly online journal http://www.historynow.org.

Since 1860, more than 80 million visitors have made George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate & Gardens the most popular historic home in America. Through thought-provoking tours, entertaining events, and stimulating educational programs on the Estate and in classrooms across the nation, Mount Vernon strives to preserve George Washington’s place in history as “First in War, First in Peace, and First in the Hearts of His Countrymen.” Mount Vernon is owned and operated by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, America’s oldest national preservation organization, founded in 1853. For more, visit http://www.mountvernon.org.