top of page
Our 2026 Mentees!
PAMELA AGBOGA
2026 PICTURE BOOK MENTEE
Pamela Agboga is a Nigerian writer and creative educator with a passion for storytelling that uplifts and inspires. She blends her background in law and communication with a love for children’s literature to craft stories that celebrate imagination, resilience, and cultural pride. Pamela believes every child deserves to see themselves as capable, creative, and worthy, and she writes to make that vision real.
Pamela is a a versatile content creator who has worked for several print, movie, and television media creators as a content developer, writer, and editor.
GISELLE ABREU
2026 MIDDLE GRADE MENTEE
As a mixed Dominican American, Giselle write stories for children with multicultural backgrounds inspired by her own upbringing. She holds a Bachelor's degree in English Literature, a Masters in Library and Information Science, and works in the Youth Services Department of her local library. Giselle has previously been mentored by two Pura Belpré Honor authors through Las Musas and Latinx in Publishing. Sometimes, she'll moonlight as a mermaid.
SHIZUKA OTAKE
2026 YOUNG ADULT FICTION MENTEE
Shizuka Otake is a writer born in New York City. In her twenties, she lived in Tokyo for four years and now wishes she had a magic door between the two cities. She loves mystery novels, Japanese TV, and traveling—a.k.a. prowling bookstores and eating.
Shizuka writes about identity and the need to find home. In 2022, she won Sisters in Crime’s Eleanor Taylor Bland Crime Fiction Writers of Color Award. Her unpublished novel Murder in Tokyo features Ayu Amita, a Japanese American teen hunting down a classmate’s killer in Tokyo.
AZI OSSMAN
2026 ADULT FICTION MENTEE
Azi Ossman is a neurodivergent Syrian-American software engineer based in Tokyo. She earned a triple bachelors in English, Film Production, and Computer Science, and a Masters in Computer Science with a focus on Natural Language Processing in the midwest. When she isn’t attending critiques or writing sprints, hyper-fixating on foreign languages (she wants to get better at German and Turkish), or binge-reading, she enjoys sleeping until noon, drinking bubble tea every day, and looking through pictures and videos of her cat on the other side of the world that she misses very much. She was an honorable mention for the 2026 Roundtable Mentorship program with another manuscript. You can find her @aziossman on instagram, twitter, threads, and bluesky.
BEA CHANG
2026 ADULT NON-FICTION MENTEE
Bea Chang is a writer, feminist, and traveler currently living in Seattle, Washington. Her personal essays have appeared in Arts & Letters, Hobart, The Offiing, Redivider, and other publications.
Bea’s work has received a Pushcart Prize nomination, and garnered Notable Mentions in the Best American Essays and the Best American Sports Writing series. She has won both the Susan Atefat Prize for Nonfiction and Beacon Street Nonfiction Contest. In addition, Bea is the recipient of fellowships from the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference, and has been awarded residencies at Monson Arts, Storyknife Writers Retreat, Dear Butte Residency, among others. She is currently a Jack Hazard fellow.
Bea is working on her first collection of essays, Everything We Couldn’t Be, an exploration of human migration, nationhood, and the search for belonging
When she is not writing, Bea enjoys playing basketball, exploring new hiking trails, and planning her next trip with her travel companion.
bottom of page