The Harrington Award Announces 2022 Winners For Excellence In Musical Theatre Writing

Triple threat composer/lyricist/bookwriters TRACY SALLOWS and Jay Alan Zimmerman recently celebrated their wins for the 2022 BMI Jerry Harrington Awards for excellence in musical theatre writing at the annual holiday party for the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop.

Previous winners include Grammy-, Oscar-, and Tony-winning composer Alan Menken (Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid), Grammy-, Oscar-, and Tony-winning composer Robert Lopez (Frozen, Book of Mormon), and Grammy- and Tony Award-winning composer Maury Yeston (Nine, Titanic) - with Yeston attending the workshop right before the party and praising Jay's lyrics!

Both Tracy and Jay develop new musicals as composer/lyricists in the Advanced workshop as well as bookwriters in the Librettists class, but this year Jay won for his songwriting in the Advanced class and Tracy won for her bookwriting in the Librettists class. Surrounded by many renowned and emerging musical theater creators, they congratulated each other for these prestigious awards and discussed their current projects including Tracy's musicals CURIOUS & RARE and RUM CREEK, and Jay's ROBOTICUS, INCREDIBLY DEAF MUSICAL, and BRAIN. STORM.

Tracy is not only a Harrington winner but also a three time Kleban finalist, the recipient of an Anna Sosenko Trust Grant, a nominee for a Jerry Bock award and her songs were chosen for a Master Class with Stephen Schwartz. She wrote the book, music and lyrics for CURIOUS & RARE, an original musical about the life of paleontologist Mary Anning, and is currently working on a new original musical, RUM CREEK about the life and times of a small town. For a taste, here is a link to a performance of the song "If" from CURIOUS & RARE and a link to a demo of the song "Wedding Band" from RUM CREEK. Tracy is also a professional actor having appeared on Broadway, Television and Film. More at maryanningmusical.com or www.tracysallows.com. Follow on instagram @curiousandrare

As a Deaf artist, Jay won after performing his winning song, "Our Universe," in both sign language and sung English. He then debuted it at Lincoln Center for the recent Broadway's Future Holiday Songbook, where he has debuted new songs for his Naughty & Nice Holiday Songbook for over a decade and where he is lovingly known as "Broadway's Beethoven." His award-winning INCREDIBLY DEAF MUSICAL appeared Off-Broadway at The Duke On 42nd Street and The Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater, and he recently created and starred in BRAIN. STORM. - a short musical movie commissioned and produced by Prospect Theater Company in honor of Beethoven's 250th birthday. As a 9/11 survivor, Jay was featured in the History Channel's 20th anniversary documentary "I Was There" and as an accessibility tech advocator innovator, he's built orchestras of robots at Spotify, turned captioning into a character at Berklee, and developed the Seeing Music visualizers with Google Creative Labs.

Tracy and Jay say they are very grateful to the BMI Workshop and BMI Foundation for these honors.