HIV League Awards Scholarships
On June 14, 2019, The HIV League announced the nine 2019 Scholars to receive an HIV League Scholarship. The scholarship is awarded annually to students living with HIV who have shown scholarly promise through their educational accomplishments, leadership, and service. The 2019 HIV League Scholars will receive $45,000 of scholarship funds to continue their studies.
The HIV League Scholars include:
Nicholas L. Calvin, of Nashville, Tennessee, served on the Mayor’s Youth Council and was a member of East Nashville Magnet School’s Allies, SGA, FCA, and the National Honor Society. In 2018 he hosted the first Mahogany Honors Empowerment Gala, honoring men and women of color in the Middle Tennessee area who fight on the front lines in the war against HIV.
Troizel D. L. Carr, of Newark, New Jersey, is an artist, advocate, and academic, who describes herself as “black + alive, meaning more than these words can say.” They are pursuing their PhD at New York University in Performance Studies. Troizel created a retreat for black queer and trans students at NYU to create community and develop methods of achieving liberation every day.
John Arthur Jackson, III, “JJ” from Jacksonville, Florida, is currently in the Master’s Program at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology in Clinical Mental Health Counseling. JJ’s primary interest is counseling queer youth of color in communities most impacted by HIV/AIDS through a mental health context. JJ is seeking to explore healing mechanisms for divergent identities whose voices are rarely heard, specifically, Black and Latino MSM.
Anthony R. Lucas, from Oakland, California, currently a third-year doctoral student in Clinical Psychology at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, is studying the dissolution of romantic relationships and their impact on the self-concept of LGBTQ-identified people. Anthony has worked with newly HIV/AIDS diagnosed youth at the East Bay AIDS Center as a youth advocate and linkage/outreach coordinator to the C.R.U.S.H Project, expanding access to PrEP and HIV/AIDS primary care to people of color in San Francisco and the East Bay.
Tankut Atuk, from Minneapolis, Minnesota, is a second-year PhD student in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He holds two master’s degrees in Gender Studies and Sociology/Cultural Studies. His current project examines the socio-political dimensions of the world’s fastest growing HIV epidemic in Turkey.
Four other women and men of color have also been honored with the HIV League’s 2019 Scholarship.
The HIV League Scholarship is the only national scholarship specifically for students living with HIV.
Read more about The HIV League their annual scholarship program, and the 2019 Scholarship recipients at www.hivleague.org.
—Reporting by Hank Trout
Hank Trout, Editor at Large, edited Drummer, Malebox, and Folsom magazines in the early 1980s. A long-term survivor of HIV/AIDS (diagnosed in 1989), he is a forty-year resident of San Francisco, where he lives with his fiancé Rick. Follow him on Twitter @HankTroutWriter.