Penn’s Kelly Writers House announced its 2026 prize and award winners on Monday.
The April 20 email shared winners for five different prizes that fund Penn students as they pursue creative projects. KWH director Jessica Lowenthal told The Daily Pennsylvanian that many of the project applications “emphasize something interdisciplinary, innovative, or entrepreneurial.”
Lowenthal, who organized the application reader committees, explained that KWH is “really interested in having ways for students to share their ideas, and then having a really direct way to support and fund those ideas.”
“Penn students are so creative, and these prizes really allow people to think outside the curriculum, outside the disciplinary structures, and to just investigate things that excite them,” she added.
Students applied for these awards by the March 15 deadline.
Lowenthal highlighted the longstanding Kerry Sherin Wright Prize — named for the first director of the writer’s house — which offers $2,000 in grant money to help execute a proposed public event and $1,000 for personal use. The award was created to “honor her communitarianism, her open intellectualism, [and] her interest in big community events,” according to Lowenthal.
This year’s Kerry Sherin Wright Prize winner is College junior and former DP staffer Sanya Tinaikar, who described her piece as a “pitch about the importance of comic storytelling, specifically narrative medicine, and how those two forms of healing almost converge.”
“That was something that I think is really worth exploring, given how this campus is so interdisciplinary,” Tinaikar told the DP.
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As she works with the writer’s house to execute her event plan next year, Tinaikar expressed hope that the initiative will “give space to both creative pursuits and professional pursuits.”
“I’m glad that I’m able to pursue this passion of mine even as I go forward in my college career,” Tinaikar added. “I wanted to do this for fun and explore my own personal interests when it comes to writing and how I want to pursue that trajectory.”
Earlier this month, Tinaikar also received the 2026 Sarah Katz Award for designing a Philadelphia-based high school summer health initiative.
College sophomore Ben Allen received this year’s Universe in Verse Prize — which allots $5,000 for a project involving poetry and science.
Allen told the DP that his idea involves analyzing suicide survivorships texts and government language when discussing the topic of suicide. He emphasized the importance of “having that awareness” about the “language that actually surrounds suicide,” to understand how discourse on the topic can continue “in a creative way.”
“When I saw this prize, I was thinking about how digital humanities methodology is pretty scientific and so those two interests of mine coalesced in this project,” he added.
Allen plans to explore the project alongside a poetry professor and a digital humanities professor at Penn, both of whom he has previously worked with.
KWH also announced two winners of the Goldstein Prize, two winners of the Terry B. Heled Travel & Research Grant, and four winners of the Creative Ventures Capital Prizes. Tinaikar and Allen were the sole winners of their individual awards.
