WASHINGTON – She would say later that she was so nervous, she felt she didn’t belong there, that one singular thought resounded in her mind when she first stepped into the room: I’m just a kid.
The Folger Shakespeare Library was crowded with the well-heeled literati, writers and thinkers and philanthropists in fancy dresses and suits circulating in the stately Elizabethan-style theater, exchanging pithy remarks and clinking wineglasses.
They’d come to support the 26th annual gala fundraiser for the esteemed PEN/Faulkner Foundation.
Tenth-grader Daniela Shia-Sevilla, one of two winners of a fiction writing contest sponsored by the foundation’s Writers in Schools program, had come to tell them a story.
Daniela was last to step onstage, her dark hair tucked behind her ears and a single printed page clasped in her fingers. Her calm, clear voice betrayed no hint of rattled nerves.
“Home alone, no guys around, I feel no danger in wearing my skin.”
She’d titled it The Quarry – a hunted creature. She wrote about what it means to be a teenage girl on a subway train, a city sidewalk, in a high school classroom. She wrote about how it feels to be the daughter of a single mother.
“When I was 5, my mother’s lovers, Floyd and Jonathan, got in a knife fight over her. She told me the blood was cranberry juice.”
She wrote about the dawning awareness of sexuality, the menacing conflation of desire and threat.
“Casting my fears aside, I tell them, ‘Boys, I’m not edible.’”
When the story ended, there was a fleeting quiet, a collective inhalation. Then the crowd’s lavish applause overwhelmed even her own wild heartbeat.
The day after the PEN/Faulkner gala, Washington Post book critic Ron Charles described Daniela’s reading as “the launch of a brilliant career.” Several of the writers sitting onstage “audibly gasped” at her story, he wrote.
Margaret Talbot, a New Yorker staff writer and one of several judges who chose Daniela’s story as a winner of the PEN/Faulkner contest, also was impressed by Daniela’s talent and poise.
“That was very startling, to see this young girl get up there and read this very personal, raw, edgy piece like that to this audience, with no apologies and no hesitations,” Talbot said. “There was a kind of toughness and swagger in her writing but also a sense of vulnerability, so I thought that was really remarkable.”
Months later, Daniela still remembers the transformative power of that moment – the promise it held for a high school sophomore who hovers on the periphery of her social circle, who wrestles with her identity as the half-Latina daughter of a lost father, who writes poems on the bus and dreams of what comes next.
“I didn’t feel like a 15-year-old girl who was scared,” she said. “I felt like a writer.”
Authentic, humble
Curled on the brown couch in the living room of the modest apartment she shares with her mother in Northwest Washington, wearing a T-shirt and leggings and a shy smile glinting with braces, Daniela is just a kid. Just maybe not a typical one.
When she speaks, her words are quiet and thoughtful, punctuated by an occasional giggle. On the page, her voice is something different: It howls, snarls, grieves and experiments with language in ways that sometimes soar and sometimes stall. Always, her writing feels impelled by a deep authenticity and an even deeper humility.
She won her first poetry slam in elementary school. Last year, she was awarded the District’s Larry Neal Writers’ Competition prize for teen poetry. A few weeks ago, she learned that she was among the top winners of the D.C.-area Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.
Daniela’s writing teachers at Duke Ellington School of the Arts encouraged her voracious reading and experimental writing.
“I started thinking more about my life, what I go through, what people I see on the street go through,” she said.
Across the room, Chimurenga Shia is smiling at her daughter, an expression that suggests baffled wonder. Shia, a petite massage therapist who exudes the same soft-spoken sweetness as her child, jokes that she doesn’t know exactly where this girl came from – how Daniela became a kid more consumed by the words of legendary writers than the influence of her peers and pop culture. Surrounded by so many new-world means of self-expression – Twitter, Instagram, Facebook – Daniela gravitates instead to an old-world tradition, shunning the glow of a screen for the weight of a hardcover novel in her hands.
What Shia does know is that Daniela always has been like this, from the first moment Shia read to her as a baby: “When she was little, she didn’t sleep with doll babies,” Shia said. “She slept with books.”
Shia is accustomed to Daniela’s constant questions about Shia’s work, or her past, or about Daniela’s father, who died when Daniela was 4. Shia, who is half white and half Lebanese, tries always to answer with unflinching honesty, knowing well by now that her responses likely will appear in her daughter’s poetry and prose.
“I know she writes about personal things, and I know she’s going to share, but it’s OK,” Shia says.
An observer, not a talker
Daniela spends most of her free time around adults – her mother, her grandmother, her godparents – but she does have a best friend, Autumnreign Bush, who is a lot like her, a quiet girl who likes to write and also is the only daughter of a single mother. The two girls spend weekends together, reading each other’s writing and hanging out in comfortable silence. Daniela describes Autumnreign as a sister. Daniela’s social life otherwise is fairly low-key, she said.
“I’m more of an observer than a talker,” she said. “I hear people talk about how they’re going to smoke some weed, they’re going to do drugs. Some of my classmates are drug dealers. I see that; I try to write about it. Girls losing their virginity in middle school.”
She describes this pragmatically, without a trace of judgment.
“I try to just capture in images how it looks – how it looks to other people, how it looks to the people who are doing it. That’s kind of how Toni Morrison writes. She puts poetry in her novels. She can say the nastiest stuff and make it beautiful.”
It isn’t always easy to feel so removed from the experiences of her classmates, Daniela admits.
“Sometimes I want to be a part of it, but then, my identity is as a writer.”
