CORRECTION APPENDED

Melinda R. Cep likes to take credit for her sister’s success. “Her first grade teacher asked her what she wanted to learn,” Melinda recalls, “and Casey was very adamant that she wanted to learn to read, because her sister already knew how.”

It didn’t matter that Melinda is two years older—Casey N. Cep ’07 is not one to put a ceiling on her ambitions. She was recently named a Rhodes Scholar, an honor she refers to as “a grant to read over the summer.” But before she transplants herself to Oxford University, where she will “read” theology, she will have to finish her senior thesis for the English and American Literature and Language department. [SEE CORRECTION BELOW]

Theses are difficult enough for those who tread the beaten path of academese. Relying on her own creativity instead of an annotated bibliography, Cep is writing a novel.

Her cautious face relaxes as she speaks of a familiar topic—her passion for words. “I loved to read the dictionary when I was little,” she says. It was through her membership in the Harvard Advocate that she realized, “Oh, you can be a writer, and this can be a legitimate job.” She is currently president of the literary magazine.

“It’s amazing to me when a writer can move a character across the room,” says Cep, acknowledging the difficulty of the task she has set for herself. But Cep has found a way to mix work with pleasure: Cep’s novel is set in her childhood home—the Eastern Shore of Chesapeake Bay—and last summer she spent two months fishing, crabbing and talking to the locals as thesis research.

“Casey’s a very serious person intellectually, definitely an academic powerhouse, but she has a lot of idiosyncratic tastes as well,” says Ben F. Tarnoff ’07, the features editor of the Advocate. Cep admits to an obsession with wills, developed the summer of her freshman year as an intern at a law firm. “If I were to die, what would I want to have said?” she wonders. “For a time, that’s the way I was thinking about the world.”

Despite not having an account herself, Cep has inspired two Facebook fangroups—“I Got a Lap Dance From Casey Cep” and “The Casey Nicole Cep Fan Club”—a testament to the fact that, even before she embarks on a literary career, she has left an imprint on Harvard College.

CORRECTION
The Dec. 13 magazine profile of Casey N. Cep ’07 misquoted Cep's description of the Rhodes scholarship. Cep called an award she received from the Harvard College Research Program--not the Rhodes Trust--“a grant to read over the summer.” The Rhodes program provides its fellows with two years of study at the University of Oxford.