The Alliance for Young Artists & Writers partnered with the Kenyon Review to offer a summer writing experience for educators participating in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards! Educators with a student who received regional recognition in the 2022 Awards were eligible to apply for tuition coverage to attend an online, six-day workshop series to hone their writing and teaching practices with the Kenyon Review. They also received a $200 stipend to support their writing.

Congratulations to Kimetris Baltrip, Jenet Dibble, Kelsie Dove, Matthew E. Henry, Candice Kelsey, David Mathews, KeeShawn Murphy, Caitlin O’Leary, Anjoli Roy, Amber Smith, Victoria Su, and Sharon Wilson!

Kimetris Baltrip, a literary journalist and journalism educator, has advised award-winning student publications for nearly a decade. Currently, she teaches scholastic journalism at an independent school in Houston. Her writing has appeared in a number of print and digital publications, including The New York Times. She has been the recipient of several journalism fellowships and mentored Rolling Stone’s 35th annual college journalism award winner whose project from her class was broadcast by an affiliate of National Public Radio. In 2016, she won a national award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications. She holds a doctorate and master’s degree from The University of Akron and a bachelor’s degree from Prairie View A&M University.

Born in the Chinese year of the rooster in a rural village in Malaysia, Jenet Dibble began telling and writing stories that run in her veins at a young age. Today, she is the Head of the Middle School Humanities Department and a Humanities teacher at The Chapin School in New York City. She reminds her students that stories matter. Stories create empathy. Stories expand the mind. Children need to read and listen to stories that mirror their lives and stories that inform them of other lives. Children need to understand all this when they write, too, and the stories they tell need to carry the history of the world, whatever size their world might be. She considers it a privilege and responsibility to help them do so.

A South Mississippi native, Kelsie Dove has been learning, teaching, and writing for most of her life. She acquired her Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from the University of Southern Mississippi in 2011, after which she began teaching high school English in Gulfport, MS. She returned to USM for her Master’s degree in English Literature in 2014, and she achieved her National Board Certification in 2020. She currently teaches AP and Dual Credit English at Gulfport High School where she sponsors the Creative Writing Club. She lives with her husband Keith and their two sons Leon and Ramsey.

Matthew E. Henry (MEH) is a high school teacher in Massachusetts, and the editor-in-chief of The Weight Journal, publishing creative writing of high school students. MEH is the author of the poetry chapbooks Teaching While Black (Main Street Rag) and Dust & Ashes (Californios Press). His full-length collection, the Colored page, is forthcoming from Sundress Publications. MEH’s recent poetry and prose are appearing or forthcoming in Baltimore Review, Barren Magazine, The Florida Review, Identity Theory, Massachusetts Review, New York Quarterly, Ploughshares, Poetry East, Porcupine Literary, Shenandoah, and Zone 3.

Candice Kelsey is an educator and poet living in Georgia. She serves as a creative writing mentor with PEN America’s Prison & Justice Writing Program; her work appears in Grub Street, Poet Lore, Lumiere Review, Hawai’i Pacific Review, and Poetry South among other journals. She is the author of Generation MySpace (2007), Still I am Pushing (2020), and winner of the Two Sisters Micro-Fiction Contest (2021). Recently, she was chosen as a finalist in Cutthroat’s Joy Harjo Poetry Prize. Find her on Twitter @candicekelsey1 and on her website candicemkelseypoet.com.

David Mathews is a Creative Writing Instructor at the Chicago High School for the Arts (ChiArts). His work has appeared in After Hours, Eclectica Magazine, CHEAP POP, Midwestern Gothic, Rust Belt Chicago: An Anthology, Open Heart Chicago: An Anthology of Chicago Writing, and elsewhere. His work has been nominated for Best of the Net, a Pushcart, and he was a Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Awards finalist.  

KeeShawn Murphy is an African-American, poet, writer, and educator from Washington, D.C. Her writing is heavily influenced by her family, God, and ridiculously energetic students. She currently teaches as an English Teaching Fellow at Phillips Academy Andover.

Caitlin O’Leary is a high school English teacher in Manhattan. She is passionate about teaching literature and making space in the classroom for personal and creative writing. Caitlin holds two graduate degrees in English literature and the teaching of English, respectively. In her free time, Caitlin enjoys reading (Elena Ferrante is her icon!), writing (in her gratitude journal or on the Notes app on her phone!), and running (in Central Park or on the treadmill!).

Anjoli Roy (she/her) was born and raised in Pasadena, California, which is Tongva land, and her ancestors are from India, Germany, England, and Ireland. With a BA in individualized study from NYU and an MA and PhD in English from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, she is a VONA/Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation fellow, a creative writer, and a high school English teacher at Punahou School in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. Anjoli is the author of the chapbook, Enter the Navel: For the Love of Creative Nonfiction (The Operating System, 2020). Her standalone works have been published in Anomaly, The Asian American Literary Review, Blue Earth Review, Creative Nonfiction’s Sunday Short Reads, Entropy, Hippocampus, Longreads, River Teeth, and others. Anjoli is also the PhDJ for “It’s Lit,” a literature and music podcast cohosted with Jocelyn Kapumealani Ng and has featured more than 100 writers to date. Visit her website at anjoliroy.com

Amber Smith is currently a creative writing teacher. She taught English/ Language Arts for 14 years. She is so glad to mesh her first love and heart passion, writing, and teaching. She is an aspiring writer and a wife of eighteen years and mother of five children.

Victoria Su teaches high school English at The King’s Academy in Sunnyvale, CA. She is passionate about poetry, cats, and helping students to see their intrinsic value as unique individuals, wonderfully made to do good work in this world. An aspiring poet-storyteller, Ms. Su hopes to enrich the literary world with words that bring her Taiwanese-Cantonese-Chinese-American heritage to life, remind people of the importance of food and family, and inspire curiosity and love for cross-cultural understanding. 

Sharon Wilson is currently in her twentieth year teaching English, Creative Writing, and Journalism at a public high school in Pennsylvania. She holds a BA and an MA in English, and a graduate certificate in Marriage and Family Counseling. In her free time, she loves to garden, ride her bicycle on rail trails, read, play piano, and connect with her online writers’ group working on memoir writing, specifically. She advises her school’s literary magazine and also a club for the integration of the arts.

Congratulations once again to these twelve educators. We hope they enjoy the time they’ll have to focus on their writing at the retreat!

Featured Image: The twelve educators selected for the Writers retreat are (clockwise from top left) Matthew E. Henry, Candice Kelsey, Anjoli Roy (Image Credit: Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada), Sharon Wilson, Kimetris Baltrip, David Mathews, Victoria Su, Kelsie Dove, KeeShawn Murphy, Caitlin O’Leary, Amber Smith, and Jenet Dibble