The Alliance for Young Artists & Writers partnered with the Kenyon Review to offer summer writing scholarships for educators participating in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards! Educators with a student who received regional recognition in the 2023 Awards were eligible to apply for tuition coverage to attend an online, six-day workshop series to hone their writing and teaching practices through the Kenyon Review’s Summer Online Writers Workshop for Teachers.
Congratulations to Juliana Crespo, Ana Kerr, Ibby Sollors, Sarah Elkamel, Annie Hackney, Claire Schomp, Cherise Lopez, Meghana Mysore, Terry Costello, Amber Smith, Carolyn Fado, and J Hernandez!
Juliana Crespo was born in Rio de Janeiro and often brings this diverse perspective to her stories which have been published in North American Review, Hobart, PANK, Literary Orphans, Flash Fiction Magazine, Ruminate, and Fiction Southeast, among others. She is an English teacher at a high school in Bloomington, Indiana, where she now lives with her family and teaches high school English.
Ana Kerr is an Ecuadorian educator who migrated to this country in 2017. A bilingual political scientist with 8 years of teaching experience in 2 different countries, she fell in love with teaching at 22 and has worked with teens and young adults since then both in schools and in her experiences as an LGBTQ activist. She began working on her sci-fi solarpunk novel in 2019 and has workshopped it with a writing critique group for the past year. Her combined experience as a teacher, political scientist, and constant learner has helped in this journey.
A graduate of Kenyon College and the University of Missouri, Ibby Sollors lives with her family in New York City, where she has taught high school and middle school English for more than a decade. She spends most evenings writing fiction and has one and a half unpublished novels saved on her computer.
Sara Elkamel is a poet, journalist, and translator living between Cairo and NYC. She holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Yale Review, Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, and in the anthology Best New Poets (2020 & 2022), among publications. Elkamel was named the winner of the Redivider’s 2021 Blurred Genre Contest and the Tinderbox’s 2022 Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize. She is the author of the chapbook “Field of No Justice” (African Poetry Book Fund & Akashic Books, 2021).
Annie Hackney is a writer and English teacher who lives and teaches in her hometown of Vestavia, Alabama. She is married with two kids, and her hobbies include reading and running.
Claire Schomp was born in Florida but was moved with her family to Ireland as an infant. She lived there until she was 12 years old and then returned to the States, leaving her with a unique personal history as well as a confusing hybrid cultural identity. She is one of eight children, but her own daughter is an only child. She did graduate work at Boston College, University of Massachusetts Amherst after graduating from Loyola University. In her life, Claire has been a runner, a writer, a restaurant server, and an educator, among many other things.
Having grown up in Cicero, Illinois, a small town outside of Chicago, Cherise Lopez views the world through the lens of her upbringing: a working-class family from a predominantly Mexican community. She values humility and hard work, and reflects these ideals as a mother to her two children and as a teacher. Growing up, she learned to care for the environment and animal welfare. She found her passion for writing in fourth grade, and it led her to study journalism at Northwestern University. Ultimately, she received a Master’s in education from Northwestern and has taught for 15 years.
Meghana Mysore is a 2022-2023 Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing. She holds a B.A. in English from Yale, and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Hollins University. Her writing has appeared in Pleiades, Indiana Review, The Yale Review, Roxane Gay’s The Audacity, Passages North, The Rumpus, The Margins, and the anthology A World Out of Reach. A Bread Loaf Rona Jaffe Scholar in Fiction, she has also received support from the Tin House Winter Workshop and the Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing. She is working on a novel-in-stories concerning loss, joy, and intergenerational memory in an Indian American family.
Terry Costello is a long-time educator from Massachusetts. In addition to teaching English Language Arts, he also writes curriculum and coaches teachers. Outside of school, he informally meets with friends to workshop writing. They collaborate to give feedback on poetry, fiction, music, and screenplays. In my free time, he likes to run, especially on trails, take part in orienteering competitions, and travel. He identifies as gay and is also a father to a five-year-old daughter.
Amber Smith is the CAPA Creative Writing teacher at Colonial Middle School in Memphis, TN. She enjoys penning juvenile tales that are engulfed with self-awareness and perseverance. Her husband of 19 years isn’t too embarrassed when she writes of romantic rendezvous, but her five children do relish the moments she provides in a feel-good story for teens about overcoming odds.
Carolyn Fado is a tenth-year teacher with experience in a wide range of teaching environments. They began their career in Bulgaria and have since taught at both bilingual and monolingual schools in the U.S, as well as both public and independent ones. They haven’t yet taken much time to work on getting their writing out there, as they have been focusing more on teaching and overcoming their own fear of sharing personal writing.
For much of her career, J Hernandez served as an electrical engineer at a national research and development laboratory. Her work involved the safety and surety of the regional electricity grid. Their resources varied from traditional to green and/or renewable energy options, and she advised energy policy considerations for sustainable communities. Her company supported educational outreach where she volunteered as a STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts-visual/performing/writing, and mathematics) mentor for students in grades 7-12. One of the parent organizations with whom she collaborated is the NAACP and its ACTSO program.