The Alliance for Young Artists & Writers is proud to announce its 2025 Alumni Micrograntees! In its tenth year, the Alumni Microgrant Program supports creative projects by Scholastic Awards alumni. The continual support of The Maurice R. Robinson Fund allows the Alliance to award six $2,000 grants to Awards alumni.
Judge and former Alumni Micrograntee Christell Victoria Roach selected Ariana Chilvers, Victoria Newton Ford, Rowana Miller, Emi Nietfeld, Jas Perry, and Alice Shuang Wu as this year’s grant recipients. Congratulations to all of our grantees—read more about their projects below!
Ariana Chilvers (Franklin, TN) – Teapot Exploration
Gold Key, Painting (2019)
Ariana Chilvers is a working potter as well as an art teacher at Stewarts Creek High School where she teaches Printmaking and Introductory Art. In her personal work, Chilvers creates teapots which develop the juxtaposition of functional and decorative ceramic work. In the United States, it can be common to find a teapot in a household, though rarely is it used for making tea. Instead, it lives on a shelf in a state where its intended purpose is to be visually pleasing to the owner. Chilvers hopes to create functional teapots, thrown on the wheel to emphasize functionality, while exploring texture and design to make beautiful work to be displayed.
American culture is a combination of various cultures around the world. In her work, Chilvers hopes to create as many teapots as possible to explore this idea and the cultures in which serving tea from a teapot is a more common practice. By wheel-throwing in her work, she explores texture, design, and size to create a body of work that can reflect her ongoing research. She intends to create at least 20-30 teapots within a year, which will be made possible with an electric pottery wheel.
Victoria Newton Ford (Washington, DC) – How We Learned to Drive
Gold Medal Writing Portfolio (2011)
Victoria Newton Ford is a poet and essayist from Memphis, Tennessee. Her work explores fungibility, violence, specters, intimacy, and memory. She is interested in examining the various forms of captivity Black women endure and how predatory formations—policing, prisons, child protective services—govern Black women’s and children’s lives. She is an inaugural 2024 Writing Freedom Fellow, a fellowship for system-impacted writers administered by Haymarket Books in partnership with the Mellon Foundation. Her writing appears in Scalawag, Literary Hub, Sojourners, Jai-Alai Magazine, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and support from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, TORCH Literary Arts, MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, and more. She earned her BA in English with a concentration in creative writing from the University of Pennsylvania.
Ford is working on a feature-length documentary about the making of her manuscript-in-progress (ISSUE), which examines slavery as an ever-present haunting in the lives of Black mothers and their children by exploring her family’s connection to the controversial 19th century abolitionist experiment in Memphis, Tennessee, known as Nashoba. This project formally takes the approach of a slave narrative, co-written with Ford’s mother using her letters and social media posts and local news articles about her incarcerations. Ford plans to develop a range of compelling audio and visual elements to enhance the immersive experience of the poems and their historical context.
Rowana Miller (New York, NY) – Contributions to the Development of Equitable Creative Writing Education Pedagogy
Gold Medal, Personal Essay & Memoir (2016); Silver Medal, Poetry (2014)
Rowana Miller is the founder and Executive Director of Cosmic Writers, a registered 501(c)(3) that provides children with the tools, knowledge, and opportunities to write creatively. Her debut novel, Secrets of the Blue Hand Girls, is forthcoming from Sourcebooks in Fall 2025. Miller has worked to become a thought leader in the writing education space. She has presented on literacy, creative writing education, and collaborative learning at conferences including those hosted by the National Council of Teachers of English, the American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics, and the Reading & Writing Project at Mossflower. She has developed and run professional development for organizations ranging from the Pennsylvania Association of Independent Schools to the New York Public Library.
On behalf of creative writing education nonprofit Cosmic Writers, Miller plans to present their model for creative writing education so that it can be utilized by ELA teachers, literacy coaches, and out-of-school-time reading and writing organizations. She has been accepted to hold a session at Face to Face, the annual conference hosted by the NYC Arts in Education Roundtable, and she is in the process of applying to present at NCTE 2025. During and outside of these conferences, she also plans to begin conversations with researchers about conducting a third-party study to more formally evaluate the effectiveness of Cosmic Writers’ model.
Emi Nietfeld (New York, NY) – The Designer Babies of Silicon Valley
Gold Key Writing Portfolio (2010); Gold Medal, Poetry (2008); Gold Medal, Photography (2009)
Emi Nietfeld is an independent journalist and the author of Acceptance (Penguin Press, 2022), a critically-acclaimed memoir of her journey from foster care and homelessness to Harvard and Big Tech, “tenderly baring the underbelly of what we call ‘success’” (People). Today, Emi reports on the intersection of Silicon Valley Culture and fertility for outlets like WIRED, The Cut, and Slate and covers the intersection of inequality and mental health as a Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Reporting Fellow. Her essays, criticism, and investigative work have appeared in The Atlantic and Mother Jones, have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and noted in the Best American Essays, and are taught in high schools, colleges, MFA workshops, and psychology PhD programs. She’s at work on a novel based on her Silicon Valley reporting.
Netfield’s nonfiction book, The Designer Babies of Silicon Valley, expands upon her magazine features investigating how tech employees are building their families using sex selection, embryonic genome sequencing, and elective gestational surrogacy. Blending reporting, cultural criticism, and history, this book places these personal decisions in their broader political context to reveal the growing gap between reproductive “haves” and “have nots” in a post-Dobbs America, and the pressing need for better regulation of and funding for emerging reproductive technologies.
Jas Perry (Chula Vista, CA) – MAD: A NOVEL-IN-VERSE
Gold Key, Poetry (2016); Silver Key, Personal Essay & Memoir (2016); Silver Key, Dramatic Script (2016); Honorable Mention Writing Portfolio (2016); Silver Key, Poetry (2015); Honorable Mention, Memoir (2015)
Jas Perry is a writer from New York, NY. She writes picture books as J.P. Takahashi and is the author of Tokyo Night Parade (HarperCollins, 2023) and Waiting for Hanami (HarperCollins, 2025). Jas is a literary agent with Looking Glass Literary & Media, where she represents stories and communities historically excluded from the traditional publishing industry. She works with writers and artists in children’s literature and comics/graphic novels for all ages. She was a juror for the 2019 and 2020 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards (Poetry, Script, Memoir, Fiction).
MAD is a Young Adult novel-in-verse inspired by her experience growing up in New York City. It explores the nuances and taboos surrounding complex comorbidities, the trials and errors of harm reduction in juvenile community care, and the horrors of psychiatric violence—particularly of Black and Brown children and adolescents—perpetrated by the American medical industrial complex. MAD is a story about the love and madness of survival. It’s comparable to George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue: A Memoir Manifesto and Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X.
Alice Shuang Wu (Montreal, Canada) – Countercurrents: Premiere at 2025 Montreal Fringe Festival
Silver Medal, Journalism (2019); Gold Key, Critical Essay (2019); Silver Key Writing Portfolio (2019); Silver Key, Humor (2019); Silver Key, Personal Essay & Memoir (2019); Silver Medal, Personal Essay & Memoir (2018)
Alice Shuang Wu (she/her) is a writer and actor based in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang (Montreal). She earned her B.A. in English Literature from McGill University, where she received the Charles William Snyder Memorial Scholarship and the Lionel Shapiro Award for Creative Writing. Her work has also earned two national Silver Medals from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. Since 2023, Alice has worked with Teesri Duniya Theatre and Tarragon Theatre to develop Countercurrents, a drama about political polarization in the social media age. This project has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and Montréal, arts interculturels.
Countercurrents is a provocative drama centering Chinese-Canadian journalist Veronica and her new roommate: her mother Rong, seduced by 5G conspiracies in response to her chronic pain. Forced to live together after Rong’s divorce, each woman wrestles with coexisting with someone they dislike—but whom they love immensely. Shuang Wu will produce the play’s premiere at the 2025 Montreal Fringe Festival (75-minute show, 6 performances). She hopes this piece will gather disparate groups of people in a shared space, inspiring critical reflection on the misinformation and fear that drive us apart and the urgent need to continue listening to each other.