CHESTERTOWN -- "It really is a room of one's own," says Kelli Youngblood as she leans across a desk strewn with her poems to look out of the garret room's only window.
The Virginia Woolf reference is deft and deliberate. Youngblood is a 22-year-old poet and student of literature who will graduate from Washington College in Chestertown on Sunday. She is also one of the candidates for the Sophie Kerr Prize, an annual cash award the school gives to a graduating senior who shows literary promise.
Sunday will mark the 30th such award given to a senior, and the college is celebrating three decades of the prize. This year, the prize -- the largest such undergraduate award in the country -- is just shy of $30,000.
But whether or not she wins, Youngblood has already been enriched by the astute beneficence of Sophie Kerr Underwood, a relatively obscure fiction writer who died in 1965 and left half a million dollars to the only private college on the Eastern Shore.
The gift was a two-pronged endowment that showed remarkable insight. Half of the annual income would be given to a graduating senior "having the best ability and promise for future fulfillment in the field of literary endeavor." The other half would finance visiting writers, books, scholarships and student publications.
Thirty-two years after her death, Kerr's legacy remains remarkable, a monument to the flinty vision of a Caroline County woman who moved to New York and earned a comfortable fortune by dint of her wits and her typewriter. The legacy from "Sophie," as students and faculty refer to her, has given 29 graduates a year of financial freedom to pursue further study, pay off studies they've already had (tuition at Washington College is about $20,000 a year) or simply find another "room of one's own" and write. No strings are placed on the gift by the Kerr will or by the college.
'The other prizes'
But even more significant, say professors and college administrators, is the other half of the gift, the part spread throughout the year and around the campus -- what one professor calls "the other prizes." It has created and nourished an energetic literary culture at the small, pretty campus in Kent County that many larger, richer schools might envy.
