Shavonne Mott, a 2023 Holden Diversity Fellow, works for the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory but she can't talk about it.
Some things she can say:
“My career path has been a very windy experience,” says Mott, whose title is technical editor and section supervisor of an editorial team. “And all the things that I thought were done in error actually helped me to be the editor that I am today. The whole time I was stuck in office administration — I do that now. I not only manage my editorial team, I manage the classified space that we work in. There’s a lot to leading a classified facility and I can go back to the skills I used when I was managing an office. It’s natural to me.”
Mott was named in 2023 as one of four Richard S. Holden Diversity Fellows, an annual program offered by the ACES Education Fund in partnership with the Dow Jones News Fund. The initiative is dedicated to promoting diversity and inclusion by advancing early- and mid-career professionals in their work as editors and aspiring industry leaders.
ACES, the country’s leading organization of editing professionals, has offered these awards in conjunction with the Dow Jones News Fund since 2020.
The application window for the 2024 Holden Fellowships is open until July 15.
Mott grew up in Maryland, a region that is famously saturated with government workers, and had a family member who always urged her to consider joining their ranks.
But she was interested in writing and in journalism, starting with being the editor of her high school newspaper. She had a college internship at an entertainment news publication, followed by jobs at the Washington Post and U.S. News & World Report. She moved to New York City and took the Columbia Publishing Course.
It was all informative and instructive, but she wasn’t working for magazines writing about arts and music, like she had intended. She kept trying, but when the student loans started coming through, she went back to the family member for ideas. She landed a job with security clearance in the government.
“I didn’t say, 'when I grow up I’m going to be a classified editor,'" Mott says. "But moving into classified work — work that has a real purpose — definitely fulfills that part of me. I have been able to build my editorial career in classified work.”
And after a decade in this rarified world that requires very specific skills and credentials, Mott has found it easy to move around. Her latest employer is very supportive of professional development.
“APL is the place where I’ve had the most professional development,” she says. “I’d never heard about ACES until I came to APL. I’ve never had anyone tell me that that was an option for helping to grow my career and fortify my skill set.”
At her employer’s suggestion, Mott attended the virtual ACES 2022 Accelerate. She started reading up on professional organizations and she dove into the ACES website. She took a couple of webcasts through ACES Academy.
Then a year ago, she received an email alert from ACES about the Holden Diversity Fellowships.
“It sounded like it was describing me,” she says. “It talked about DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] work and about being in mid-career. I saw that and I applied to it. I wasn’t going to at first, because of impostor syndrome. I turned in my application the day it was due. I didn’t think that I would get it or that I was good enough. Or maybe that it wasn’t talking about me. Apparently, it was for me.”
It certainly was, says Lisa McLendon, the president of the ACES Education Fund Board of Directors.
"Shavonne has had a truly impressive career to date, plus she knew exactly where she wanted to improve,” she says. “Her action plan exemplified the purpose of the Holden Diversity Fellowship: to help editors from diverse backgrounds grow their skills and contribute even more to their fields and to the editing profession as a whole."
Mott had never been to a professional conference before ACES and she appreciated not having to ask her employer to pay for her to go to ACES 2024 San Diego, an event she found instructive on several levels.
“It put me in a community with other editors, especially a diverse community,” Mott says.
She connected with two others from the 2023 Holden Diversity Fellows cohort, Rosalind Early and Tiana Garrett.
“Sitting with three or four other Black editors feels so diverse to me. This is what's missing. It's what I hope to help change in my current work environment,” she says.
At the conference Mott gravitated toward the sessions on technical writing, AI, accessibility, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.
“Those sessions really meant something to me,” she says. “Being in those spaces with people who are experiencing what I’m experiencing. The conference made me touch base with what I really want to do. As a supervisor I don’t get to do as much individual editing anymore. So it made me reimagine what I could do, and what other options are out there.”
Right now, Mott says, she has a full plate with her job, plus she still tries to write, including personal essays, fiction, and screenplays. She’s thinking about getting more involved with ACES in the future. And she encourages anyone thinking about applying for a Holden Diversity Fellowship not to hold back.
“I was surprised when I won. I didn’t think that I had a story or anything. But in my essay I talked about my experiences with diversity efforts and where I want to see my career go. If you’re thinking about the Holden, just do it. Just apply.”
