Wondering how to get your art and writing noticed beyond the Scholastic Awards? This virtual panel is geared towards alumni of the Awards looking for practical advice on how to get their creative work promoted, published, and exhibited. Creative professionals Sasha Baskin, Thierry Kehou, Tiffanie Lee, and Kim Turrisi will offer guidance and insights from their professional and personal experiences during this one-hour panel discussion, moderated by Delali Ayivor.
This panel is open to all members of the Scholastic Awards communities.
Wednesday, February 28, 2024 | 7:00–8:00 pm ET
About the Panelists
Sasha Baskin is a practicing weaver and lacemaker. She received her BFA in drawing from the Maryland Institute College of Art and her MFA in Craft and Material Studies from Virginia Commonwealth university. Her exhibition record includes The Baltimore Museum of Art, the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, Blue Spiral 1 Gallery in Asheville, NC, and the Visual Arts Center in Austin, TX. Baskin was a 2018-2019 Artist in Residence at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts and a 2020 and 2022 Penland Winter Resident. Her teaching record includes undergraduate coursework at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Johns Hopkins University, Stevenson University, and Virginia Commonwealth University as well as workshops at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, John C. Campbell Folk School, and Penland School of Craft. Baskin currently teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Sasha is also a Scholastic Awards alumna, receiving a Gold Key Portfolio Award in 2010.
Thierry Kehou is a Cameroonian American writer and a graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Rutgers University-Newark. He is the translator of A Sun to be Sewn byJean D’Amérique’s, a 2023 NPR Book of the Day, published by Other Press. His writing appears or is forthcoming in Guernica, Departures, Lampblack, The Huron River Review, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference and the Fulbright Program, and his translation of Francis Bebey’s Three Little Shoeshiners was longlisted for the 2020 John Dryden Translation Competition. He is the director of programs and partnerships at Poets & Writers and co-founder of the Lampblack Literary Foundation, a nonprofit organization supporting writers from the global black diaspora.
Tiffanie Lee is an award-winning associate creative director who specializes in creative campaigns from pitch to development to launch. She has worked with the world’s most visible brands throughout her journey at distinguished agencies, including BBDO and McCann Worldgroup—and at breakthrough agencies, such as AdWeek‘s Inaugural A.I. Agency of the Year Media.Monks. Although she’s obsessed with ad land, Tiffanie actually began her professional career as a project manager in the fashion industry, while moonlighting as a music and arts journalist in her 5-9. Before going agency-side, she dabbled in both in-house and marcomm work. Given this unique “outsider insider” experience, she is heavily invested in helping younger creatives navigate the advertising industry’s often competitive and evolving landscape.
Kim Turrisi began her career in film and television. She won a Daytime Emmy for a web series she co-created and wrote: Venice The Series. She is currently the Director of Programming and Events for SCBWI (Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators). Her debut young adult novel Just a Normal Tuesday is loosely based on her own experience struggling through the emotional aftermath of her sister’s suicide. Her sophomore novel, Carmilla, is based on the wildly popular web series of the same name. Kim’s favorites: Creating playlists for her characters, pajamas, slippers, plaid flannel shirts with snack pockets, Vans, and socks. Her sock collection is legendary. When she isn’t writing or reading, she can be found obsessing over her dogs, Auggie and Maui.
About the Moderator
Delali Ayivor is a Ghanaian-American writer, librarian, and non-profit administrator. Her work, both as a librarian/archivist and as a poet/essayist is grounded in her lived experience growing up in the Global South, where access to mainstream flows of information were often fractured, tenuous, refracted or distorted. She wrote once of Ghana: “this is as West Africa is, constantly trapped somewhere in the binary of finite and fracture.” Thus, her work—like her country and herself—is fundamentally concerned with the structural: intersections, frictions, overlaps, and sites of disjuncture.
She is a 2023 graduate of the Pratt Institute School of Information with a M.S. in Library and Information Sciences; a graduate of Interlochen Arts Academy and Reed College, a 2011 U.S Presidential Scholar in the Arts, a 2020 Tin House Workshop Scholar, and a member of the second class of Kehinde Wiley’s Black Rock Senegal residency. She currently lives and works between Fort Greene, Brooklyn and Accra, Ghana. Delali is also a Scholastic Awards alumna, receiving a Gold Medal in Poetry in 2011.