John Domen | jdomen@wtop.com
October 8, 2025, 6:11 PM
Zaila Avant-garde won the Scripps National Spelling Bee in 2021, becoming the first African American to win the nation’s premier spelling bee contest. At the time, she was living in Louisiana, but that didn’t stop University of Maryland President Darryll Pines from offering her a full scholarship to College Park.
Four years later, Avant-garde is attending the University of Maryland. Her family now lives in Prince George’s County.
But she never phoned in a favor to help make it happen. In fact, when she applied, she wasn’t entirely sure the offer still stood.
“That was definitely in the back of my mind a few years later as I began my college search,” she said. “I actually ended up getting a different scholarship. But I’m here for free, and that’s all that matters!”
Avant-garde is attending Maryland on a Banneker-Key Scholarship, studying cell biology and molecular genetics. She’s also working on her sixth book — one of the other five, titled “It’s Not Bragging If It’s True,” was a New York Times bestseller.
“Think of it as like a big sister giving advice,” she said, adding that she herself is a big sister. “Giving you advice on confidence, really promoting self-confidence, and kind of learning how to work on time management. Truly, the main focus of it is self-confidence, like learning how to believe in yourself and believe in the work that you’ve done and believe that you are worthy of being in the spaces that you’re in.”
Those are the kind of thoughts she said helped her win the Spelling Bee in 2021. Her winning word sounds like “Maria” but was actually “murraya.” It’s a Latin-Swedish word for a subtropical evergreen plant found in Asia.
“One of my pet peeves about my winning word, murraya, is that it doesn’t sound like a very hard word. And the fact that I made a joke connecting it to Bill Murray … I think it really made people think that it’s a really easy word,” she admitted.
“I cannot stress this enough, no, it’s not,” she insisted with a smile. “Everybody’s like, ‘Oh, I would have been able to spell that.’ You always spell that because I said, ‘Oh, like Bill Murray.’”
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John has been with WTOP since 2016 but has spent most of his life living and working in the DMV, covering nearly every kind of story imaginable around the region. He’s twice been named Best Reporter by the Chesapeake Associated Press Broadcasters Association.
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