Valued Feedback by Naomi Yolonda

Valued Feedback by Naomi Yolonda - August 2026 Scholarship Essay

I stared at my blank screen, tears dripping down my face, sure that I didn’t have the ability to write a good story. While at the time I didn’t understand, I now know that this stemmed from the fact that I didn’t have representation of myself in the books or authors that I was most often presented with. I grew up in San José, an area that did not have a big Black community. Growing up in such an area ensured that I didn’t have much representation at school and in academic subjects. Because of this, my mom enrolled me in a Black Book Club to help me to gain confidence, not only as a writer/reader, but as a Black girl in this world. I read books that showed me I wasn’t different from everybody else no matter how hard they tried to make me feel like I was. I learned how to be myself unapologetically, no matter what the world tried to tell me. This experience allowed me to gain enough confidence in myself to go after my goals and reach for the stars.
In my senior year of high school, I wanted to challenge myself, so I took a Creative Writing class. I was very nervous about this class, and as soon as I sat in my chair on my first day, I thought “Why did I even do this?”. One day, my teacher had us exchange our writing with one of our peers to read. This terrified me, I hated sharing my writing, and feared the judgement of anyone on something I found so personal. I hated it so much I often found myself frozen, and unable to put a single word on the page. My classmate read my piece and I read their’s, and I found that there was no harsh judgement from me on their writing. We talked about what we wrote, and gave each other very useful feedback. It made me able to use what I had written for an assignment in class and receive a grade of 100% on it.
This experience taught me that feedback is not something to fear, but instead something to value. It’s important to get something, anything, on a page just to get the ball rolling. Feedback is an important part of the process of creating anything to make it the best possible version of itself it can be.