Earlier this year, Palen Stream sat down to write about one experience that screamed “Iowa” to her as part of a class assignment. It was difficult, but not for lack of ideas—she couldn’t pick just one.

In the end, the then-sophomore at Bedford Community High School documented several of her favorite experiences that reflected her home state: the scents and sounds noticed during harvest season; the feel of the basketball in her hands and the jarring blows absorbed by her knees; hearing a newborn animal’s cries on the family farm; the taste of Saturday family meals served in advance of Hawkeye football games.

“I had a writing mentor of mine proofread it—she thought it was well written,” says Stream, who has always lived in the Bedford, Iowa, area. “She told me I should submit it to the contest. I had planned on doing so, just for fun, but her advice really gave me confidence.”

That contest was the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature organization’s 2014 Paul Engle Day: Glory of the Senses Essay Contest. The University of Iowa partnered with the Iowa City organization to offer the top prize winner one year of free tuition to the UI.

Stream won that top prize with her essay, “The Trail of Senses That Leads Me Home.” Judges remarked that the essay was “a tour-de-force through the sounds, smells, and sensations of quintessential Iowa, taking her reader fluidly through the complex set of emotions that arise from growing up in a state with one foot planted firmly in tradition and one foot pointed toward the future.”

The contest winners—six students received runners-up awards—will be recognized Oct. 4 at an event held in conjunction with the Iowa City Book Festival. UI President Sally Mason will be on hand at the event.

“The young people who participate in the contest demonstrate that, in the tradition of Paul Engle, an Iowa childhood is fertile ground for great writing,” Mason said in remarks following the announcement of the contest winners.

Stream, a three-sport athlete at Bedford Community, had just finished practice when she received word from the contest organizers. “I showed the email to my friends, who were ecstatic,” she says. “I didn’t really realize just what I had won until I went home and looked it up. After that, I was pretty happy!”

Stream says her career path might point toward an engineering field, but for now, she has unfinished business at Bedford. The varsity basketball team made it to the state tournament last year; before Stream graduates, she hopes to leave that tournament with the championship trophy in hand. She also hopes to have more opportunities to run at the state track meet, and aims to maintain her current 4.0 GPA all the way to commencement in 2016.

Stream looks forward to attending the UI, the university that her entire family has rooted for all her life, noting the solid academic program and the opportunity to attend a bigger school as positives. She’s up for any challenge, thanks to her upbringing.

“I grew up doing a lot of the grunt work around our farm—I still do,” she says. “I don’t think I would have some of the values I do today without the hard work I put in over the years.”

From Palen Stream's "The Trail of Senses That Leads Me Home":

If it is true that we are supposed to listen to our hearts, then the sounds of southern Iowa echo loudly within me.

Few great pieces of music can rival the sound of a newborn calf taking in its first breath of air and bellowing a deep guttural sound of hunger meant for its weary mother. I leave after the birth so I don’t disturb the critical moments in which the mother will claim its newborn, but I always stay to listen to the soft sounds of a mother and calf meeting for the first time. The mother, always attentive and caring, begins to run her rugged tongue over the calf in an effort to cleanse it and ensure that it stays warm. The steady thrum of her careful tongue carries on for long minutes before the calf grows impatient to fill its belly.

The calf’s throaty wails fill the barn as it notifies practically anyone in a three-mile radius that its unbridled hunger urgently needs quenched. The mother finally ends her careful inspection of the calf and allows it to nurse. Afterwards, the calf drunkenly wobbles to its mother’s side to snuggle in for a long nap. The contented sighs of the calf are all that can be heard over the exhausted mother chewing her cud after a job well done.

For a short while the barn is silent and I begin to hear my own beating heart, the chirping of the first spring birds outside, the subdued guzzling as another cow sips from the trough, and I think what I’ve heard is the purest sound of Iowa anyone can distinguish.