The Alliance for Young Artists & Writers has once again partnered with the Kenyon Review to offer summer writing scholarships for educators participating in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards! Educators with a student who entered the 2024 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. 

Thank you and congratulations to the following twelve educators for earning their position in this year’s cohort of educator-writers! 

Jared Agard is originally from Sacramento, CA, but now lives and teaches in Beaverton, OR. His novel Dread Watch was published in 2021 and he is currently working on a YA science fiction novel. His completed contemporary novel seeks to help young people communicate if they are victims of sexual harassment or abuse.  

Mazerick Betko is a multidisciplinary artist and teacher in Birmingham, Alabama. They use writing, music, bookmaking, drawing, and performance to tell stories about intimacy, heartbreak, damaging memories, and hope. Their work is interested in the contradictions of intimacy and how we can move through the world with more grace. 

Sara Brock lives in New York City. For more than twenty years, she has been teaching English in a public high school on Long Island, filling up tiny notebooks on early morning train rides. Her essays have appeared in books about teaching and learning. When she’s not in her classroom, she’s painting at her easel, biking along the river, or walking in the park with her family. 

Dasha Brown, also known as Day Summer, is a writer from Queens, New York, who writes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. She is known for being a regional judge for Poetry Out Loud and welcoming visiting author Rachel Wiley to Susquehanna University. Dasha holds her bachelor’s degree in creative writing-Secondary Education and is currently teaching at one of the best schools in Pennsylvania. She uses her natural talent for writing to educate the youth on unlocking their creative abilities. She is currently working on a novel called This is where it starts that tackles racism and finding your truth. 

Julia Bucci teaches English at Dana Hall School in Wellesley, MA. Her work has appeared or will appear in publications including Cognoscenti, Gyroscope Review, SBLAAM, and Teach.Write; in micro film festivals; and on the Moth Radio Hour. Julia holds a bachelor’s degree in Humanities from the University of Chicago and a PhD in English from UMass Amherst. Julia’s other teaching adventures include coaching screenwriters and teaching life writing to older adults. As a Moth educator with training in digital storytelling, she does her best work writing with, or for, her students. 

Lilia Guimares is a Brazilian English and Creative writing teacher based in Aurora, CO.  

Maria Illich is an award-winning educator and author living in Houston, where she teaches middle school English and creative writing. Her passion for literacy—especially among the young—prompted her to found the Middle School Poetry Fest in the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston. Some of her awards include those from the Press Women of Texas, the National Federation of Press Women, and the Texas Institute of Letters. Her poems and stories appear in various journals and anthologies.  

Patricia A. Jackson is a high school English and Creative Writing teacher in Pennsylvania. Her debut novel Forging A Nightmare (Angry Robot) is a delightfully heretical urban fantasy with a Black-led cast of fallen angels, infernal warhorses, and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. No stranger to writing science fiction/fantasy, her favorite creative playground is in the Star Wars universe. Patricia’s best known works are Black Sands of Socorro (WestEnd Games), a smugglers’ sourcebook, and “The Final Exit,” a short story about a dark Jedi’s redemption. Her latest tale from a galaxy far, far away is “Gone to the Winner’s Circle” featured in A Certain Point of View: Return of the Jedi (Random House/Penguin). She briefly crossed universes in Star Trek: Women Take the Conn (Betsy Books) with the essay “Nyota Uhura: Not Just Another Token.”  

Elina Kumra is a BIPOC writing teacher and lives in San Jose, California. Her poems and fiction have been published in Quarterly West, Wingless Dreamer, Reed Magazine, Up North Lit, Writer’s Digest, Quibble Lit, StreetLit, Coffin Bell, Polyphony Lit, Death Rattle, Typishly, Cathexis NorthWest Press, Tint Journal, and the Peauxdunque Review. She is 2024 Reed Magazine Emerging Voices Winner, a finalist in Quarterly West, Fractured Lit, Ouroboros, and a semi-finalist in the Nine-Syllables Chapbook Contest. 

Margaret Monteith holds a BA from USC, an MFA from Brooklyn College, and a Masters from Columbia University. She has received scholarships to attend the Cuttyhunk Island Residency, a residency at the Wassaic Project, and an NEH teacher’s stipend. She has attended Sewanee, Bread Loaf, and Tin House. She is also a two-time semi-finalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, a semi-finalist for the Iowa Short Fiction Award, a finalist for the Southwest Review’s David Nathan Meyerson Fiction Prize, and a semi-finalist for The L Magazine‘s Literary Upstart. Her writing has appeared in BOMB, Fugue, Evergreen Review, Gargoyle, and elsewhere. 

With a BA in English Education and an MFA in Creative Writing, Lori Novick-Carson has spent most of her life teaching literature and writing. She has taught at the middle school, high school, and college levels, and currently teaches Creative Writing, AP Literature, and Junior Honors English at Sharon High School in Massachusetts. She is a recipient of the Facing History and Ourselves Margot Stern Strong Teaching Award and the UC Santa Barbara Inspiration Award for Outstanding Teacher.  

Jen Siraganian is an Armenian-American writer, educator, and former Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, California. A graduate of Brown University and University of Arkansas, she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, awarded a Lucas Arts Fellowship, and profiled in San Francisco Chronicle and The Mercury News. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Southwest Review, Mid-American Review, Smartish Pace, and other journals and anthologies. She has served as Managing Director for Litquake: San Francisco’s Literary Festival and taught literature and creative writing in schools and community settings for twenty years. Jensiraganian.com