Scholarship Recipients

Alta Starr
Women Uninterrupted Scholarship

Alta Starr, currently the Director of Training for Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity BOLD, is a healer, somatic practitioner, embodiment trainer, and organizational consultant with expertise in building high-performing teams. She spent twenty-five years as a grantmaker supporting organizing and social movements to build political power in underserved and marginalized U.S. communities, especially in the South. Her own political engagement began in the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and informed her early work as a teacher, parent organizer, and radio news and music producer. She has published essays about embodiment, including the introductory chapter to the book, Making and Being, a textbook for undergraduate students in the visual arts. Her book project, tentatively titled Conjugating Freedom, is a collection of essays and poems examining freedom as an embodied experience, and how we come to love and demand it, individually and collectively.

Latonya Slack
Women Uninterrupted Scholarship

Latonya looks for ways to weave spirit, energy, and intuition with social justice, nonprofit management, philanthropy, and law. As a facilitator and coach, she is most interested in supporting others to connect to their best and highest purpose in life. A truth seeker, she uncovers the inner workings and strengths behind the veil of nonprofit social justice leadership as affirmed by women of color founders and directors. Her work celebrates and affirms the stories and lived experiences that acknowledge that the way we lead is not only necessary but different.

Grounded firmly in an intersectional perspective centering race and gender, her book uplifts and affirms BIPOC nonprofit leadership through storytelling and a coach approach. For the next few months, she will work on crafting her own leadership story. Raised in the deep south, Latonya has lived for 30+ years in the city of angels where she enjoys hosting the occasionally rowdy and always competitive game night.

Jenise Miller
Winner of a Full Scholarship

Jenise Miller is an Afro-Panamanian writer and urban planner from Compton, California. Her work explores art, archives, mapping, and intersectional history. She is a California Arts Council Artist Fellow and a Tin House and VONA workshop alum. She coordinates the History of Compton Arts Interview Project and edits the KCET Artbound series, “Compton: Art and Archives.” She is a recent PEN Emerging Voices and Women’s National Book Association Fellow. A Pushcart-nominated poet, her writing is published in her poetry chapbook, The Blvd, as well as Boom California, Los Angeles Review of Books, Los Angeles Times, and the forthcoming anthology, Writing the Golden State: The New Literary Terrain of California. Jenise is working on a collection of essays that maps her family’s migration through place history, memory, and art.

Elizabeth Upshur
Winner of a Full Scholarship

Elizabeth Upshur is a Black Southern writer. She is a proud Fulbright alumna, Poetry Co-Editor at Okay Donkey Mag, contributing editor at The Seventh Wave, and social media manager at the forthcoming journal The Loveliest Review. She is the 2020 Gigantic Sequins winner for her flash “motherfucker” and has won prizes from Brown Sugar Lit and Colorism Healing for work that deals in race, place, and the speculative. Her work has been longlisted for the 2022 Granum Prize, shortlisted for the inaugural Samuel R. Delany Prize, and nominated for a Pushcart. She has workshopped at The Frost Place, Bread Loaf Translators, Poets on the Coast, and Mendocino. Her writing lives in EcoTheo, Augur Mag, Pretty Owl Poetry, and others. She will work on a book of speculative poems, interrogating motifs of Medusa, the minotaur, and ghosts.

Tijanna O. Eaton
Unicorn Alum Award

Tijanna (Tə-zha-na; she/her) is a Black MOC dyke with a high school diploma and a rap sheet who has been a member of the Unicorn Authors Club since Day One. She has read selections from her upcoming memoir, BOLT Cutters, at over half a dozen events and was featured on an episode of the Little Miss Addict podcast. BOLT Cutters tells the stories of her twelve arrests in three years in the early nineties and chronicles her descent into heroin addiction, jail, prostitution, and homelessness and her ascent back to a normal poly kinkster queerdo life. She likes to play bass, write, fuck, eat, and smoke cigarettes. Tijanna is Board Chair of Five Keys Schools and Programs, served on the board of the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project from 2016 to 2018, and was the 2015 to 2017 POC liaison to the International Ms. Leather competition. Short, rough, and bossy, she plays from the top down and gets dressed from the bottom up. Pocket butch. Tijanna is currently coordinator of the Bolt Cutters Cohort.

Connie Pertuz-Meza
Women Uninterrupted Scholarship

Connie, a Colombian American writer, is inspired to pen pieces about her life, family, and ancestors. A NYC public school educator, she is the mother of two teenagers, daughter of a mother who taught herself to read with a Bible and a journalist father. Connie’s writing appeared in The Rumpus, Kweli Literary Journal, Lunch Ticket, Chalkbeat, The Nasonia, Women Who Roar, Herstryblg, Intervenxtions NYU Latinx Project, Raising Mothers, Dreamers Creative Writing, Voices In The Middle, The Acentos Review, MUTHA, and several anthologies. A forthcoming multicultural picture book with Scholastic 2022. Connie is a three-time VONA alum and board member, a Tin House participant, 2021 Kweli Sing The Truth! Mentorship Program recipient, a 2022 Pen America Emerging Fellow, and Aspen Words Ricardo Salinas Latinx recipient. Connie is working on a semi-autobiographical YA novel, and is a guest writer for Hispanecdotes and Epifania Magazine.

DW McKinney
Manuscript Revision Scholarship

DW is a Black American writer, a mother of two, a person who loves graphic novels, and an avid gardener. DW does not have an MFA or a substantial creative writing background—she holds a bachelor of science in biology and a master of arts in anthropology. But DW is serious about writing; passionate about it. DW is an associate editor at Shenandoah Literary and an editor for Raising Mothers and Writers Resist. DW also has received fellowships from the Writers Colony at Dairy Hollow, Shenandoah Literary, and The New Southern Fugitives.

Daniel James Belnavis
Karen Wendy Scholarship

Daniel (he/him) is a multi-disciplinary storyteller. Daniel’s primary professional experience has been as a musical theater performer. It is within his musical theater career that he first experienced the power of storytelling. It was a storytelling tied to escapism. He could escape his circumstances, his reality, even his identity (to a certain degree) by playing other people—by telling other stories. As Daniel grew older and more accomplished within the industry, however, he discovered that a career which once felt expansive, had begun to feel stifling. Daniel grew tired of only playing straight characters, or characters that felt like appropriated and caricatured representations of Black people, or feeling pressured to look a certain way. He no longer wanted to escape his reality—he wanted to embrace it. He wanted to share the complexity of his experience as a queer Black man, knowing that musical theater as a medium would almost never provide him with the opportunity to do so. Daniel has always journaled but in his mid-twenties he began writing essays (mostly personal narrative and cultural criticism). Writing opened up an entirely new mode of storytelling to him that was (and continues to be) more fulfilling than any role he has ever played. Initially, Daniel had no specific goal or purpose in mind with his writing but as his passion and commitment deepened, he realized he did not want it to be a private creative outlet—Daniel wants it to be a career.

Almah LaVon Rice writes Afrosurreal speculative fiction. In the Club, she worked on a book of interlocking short stories remixing African American folktales, cephalopods, hummingbirds, time travel, neurodivergent queers, kites, and more, set in a panoramically Black neighborhood not unlike the one she lives in now.

She is from the U.S. South and currently resides in the ancestral territory of the Osage Nation (Pittsburgh, PA).

Casandra Lopez
Women Uninterrupted Scholarship

Casandra is a Chicana and California Indian (Tongva, Luiseño, Cahuilla) writer and educator, living in diaspora on Coast Salish territory. She teaches at Northwest Indian College.

In the Unicorn Authors Club, she worked on her memoir, A Few Notes on Grief, which explores the cycle of violence prevalent in her hometown of San Bernardino, California, and the ruptures caused by incarceration, urban violence, and colonialism.

MK Chavez
Women Uninterrupted Scholarship

MK is a queer Black Latinx author, curator of literary events, and social justice activist, with family roots in the liminal space of the Salvadoran and African diasporas.

In the Unicorn Authors Club, she completed her manuscript for her third book, Blueprint for Mysterious Creatures, a collection of hybrid writing that uses verse journalism, fragmented and oblique memoir, film appreciation, and various poetic forms to explore the experience of other through the lens of horror films. Subsequently, she won a 2021 San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press Literary Award in poetry.