I am honored to have been chosen as the winner of the first annual Beltran Family Award for Innovative Teaching & Mentoring at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kelly Writers House. As the winner, I received funding to organize and host a program at Kelly Writers House. My project is a letterpress art book edition of a short story written by a member of the KWH community.

The competition drew entries from Kelly Writers House friends, students, and alumni on several continents. Entries were read anonymously by a panel of volunteer judges from the KWH community. We were overwhelmed by the quality of the submissions. The final decision was based on a number of factors in addition to literary merit, including design possibilities for the letterpress project.

I am pleased to announce that the story is “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart” by Sam Allingham. Sam’s wonderful short story, set in the jazz world of the 1940’s, resonates perfectly with the concept of this project.

Sam served as an Administrative Assistant at KWH from 2006 to 2008 and has been a regular at programs there ever since. His fiction has appeared in print in One Story, American Short Fiction, and Epoch, and on the wet at n+1 and Web Conjunctions, and The Coffin Factory. Sam received a Special Mention for the Pushcart Prize in 2007 for his story “Bar Joke, Arizona.”

The two other finalists for the project were Sanaë Lemoine for “Obituary for My Father” and Rachel Taube for “Pinning Amy.”

Sam’s story has been published in a beautiful letterpress edition by Penn’s Robinson Press, designed and produced by Kelly Writers House’s own Henry Steinberg.

The publication and launch party took place at Kelly Writers House on February 19, 2013. For more information, see the article in my blog: www.rilesmith.com/songbook/ and read this article in the Pennsylvania Gazette.

–Karen