The 14-year-old from Harvey, La., breezed to the championship at the Scripps National Spelling Bee on Thursday night, becoming the first African American winner and only the second Black champion in the bee’s 96-year history. Zaila has described spelling as a side hobby, although she routinely practiced for seven hours a day. Zaila twirled and leaped with excitement after spelling the winning word, “murraya,” a genus of tropical Asiatic and Australian trees. Both Zaila and Chaitra are coached by Cole Shafer-Ray, a 20-year-old Yale student who was the 2015 Scripps runner-up. The only previous Black winner of the bee was Jody-Anne Maxwell of Jamaica in 1998.

Source: Los Angeles Times July 09, 2021 02:26 UTC