After receiving a record number of applicants and a competitive adjudication process, the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers is pleased to announce that Carolina Ixta Navarro-Gutiérrez and Da’Shawn Mosley have been selected by author and writer Kiese Laymon as the 2019 recipients of A Suite of One’s Own: A Writer’s Residency. Made possible by the support of Amazon Literary Partnership and The Roosevelt Hotel, this annual Writer’s Residency enables two Alumni of the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards to travel to New York City and spend five nights at the historic Roosevelt Hotel. Over the course of the Residency, Navarro-Gutiérrez and Mosley will be granted the time and space to focus on their writing projects, and receive opportunities to meet with literary professionals.
Meet the Residents
Carolina Ixta Navarro-Gutiérrez (’12–’14)
Carolina Ixta Navarro-Gutiérrez is a writer from Oakland, California. Her work is focused on the intersecting veins of urban communities, the Latinx identity, and personal trauma. She is primarily a fiction writer, but also experiments with the forms of memoir, flash fiction, and prose poetry. Currently a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, Navarro-Gutiérrez is obtaining her master’s degree in education and teaching kindergarten. While in residency for A Suite of One’s Own, she plans to work on a collection about her hometown of Oakland, alongside mapping out a new novel.
Da’Shawn Mosley (’11–’12)
Website: https://sojo.net/biography/dashawn-mosley
Da’Shawn Mosley is culture editor of Sojourners magazine. He graduated from the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, where he studied creative writing, and earned a B.A. in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago. In 2012, he was named a U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts. Mosley has been featured in the PBS documentary Becoming an Artist and published in the Adroit Journal. An excerpt of his essay “Dark Matter” was exhibited in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. He intends to use the Writer’s Residency to complete the first draft of a novel.