Yale Announces Innovative Leader Scholarship Winners

The Yale Publishing Course has named the winners of its inaugural Innovative Leader Scholarship. The winners will receive scholarship to this summer’s Leadership Strategies in Magazine Media and Leadership Strategies in Book Publishing programs. 

The winners, with bios, are listed below. For the full press release, click here. 

Magazine Media scholarship winners

Domestic: Antionette G. Kerr, Chief Executive Officer, The Write Folks (North Carolina, USA)
Antionette is the founder of Empowerment Magazine, a free resource of knowledge published by the Lexington Housing Community Development Corporation, a nonprofit agency that seeks to assist families in obtaining decent, safe and affordable homeownership opportunities. As Executive Director of LHCDC, she combines her love of journalism and economic empowerment to improve her community.

International: Comfort Sakoma, Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Poize Magazine (Gwarinpa, Nigeria)
Comfort launched Poize Magazine to use the power of publishing to advocate for women in Nigeria. Her passion for a more inclusive Africa led her to successfully petition for and host the first and only gender event at the World Economic Forum on Africa in April 2014. Comfort hopes to make Poize Magazine the highest selling African entrepreneurship magazine read by women.

Book Publishing scholarship winners

Domestic: Tarek El-Elaimy, Marketing Manager for North America, American University in Cairo Press (New York, USA)
Tarek has set out to change the book industry’s lack of consumer data. Working with a team of computer scientists, he helped create ReadSenses, a book-marketing platform that helps publishers discover and connect directly with potential readers. ReadSenses was a finalist in the Publishing Hackathon and won second place in HarperCollins’ BookSmash Challenge.

International: Deborah Ahenkorah, Executive Director & Co-Founder, Golden Baobab; Founder, African Bureau for Children’s Stories (Accra, Ghana)
Deborah founded Golden Baobab, a non-profit organization, whose mission is to enable Africans to create written content for children that reflect African experiences. She also founded the African Bureau for Children’s Stories to make sure these books got into the hands of children all over the world.