Sam Apple Receives Kelly Writers House Award

Sam Apple, a faculty member in the Creative Writing Program, was awarded the Beltran Family Award for Innovative Teaching and Mentoring at the Kelly Writers House.

Al Filreis, Kelly Family Professor of English and Faculty Director at Kelly Writers House, says, “Students describe Sam as thoughtful and witty, intellectually and aesthetically open and generous, and always willing to spend more time guiding, supporting, and working closely with a student’s writing. He is an accomplished writer himself, of course, and over the years in his creative writing classes and through programs he’s led at the Kelly Writers House he has figured out, with great success, how to integrate his life as a writer with his life as an advocate of other writers who work collaboratively.”

Apple is the author of Schlepping Through the Alps, American Parent, and The Saddest Toilet in the World. He has written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Wired, The Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times Magazine, ESPN The Magazine, The MIT Technology Review, McSweeney’s, and Slate.com, among many other publications. Schlepping Through the Alps was a finalist for the PEN America Award for a first work of nonfiction.
 
The Beltran Family Award for Innovative Teaching and Mentoring at the Kelly Writers House is presented annually to someone who teaches writing in the extracurricular context of the Kelly Writers House, its projects, programs, and people. The Beltran Award is not only for excellent classroom teaching, but is intended to honor the making and sustaining of a learning environment and the spirit of informal and outside-of-class mentoring that the best teachers embody.