The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2026 Spring Literature Grant to sheena daree romero for her short story project, titled On Guacamole That Comes Out of a Squirt Gun.

On Guacamole That Comes Out of a Squirt Gun, is a short story collection-in-progress that grapples with black girlhood, queerness, and education, and explores the locations we teach black girls to scour for joy, worth, and understanding.

 The stories are set in worlds where exceptionalism, strength, and working ‘twice as hard’ are not prerequisites to being valued or surviving—worlds where black girls get to shine in their mediocrity and peculiarity and be young, silly, and harmless. Humor, dismay, and a Midwestern sensibility paint the aesthetic and voice of the stories, which are influenced by writers like Venita Blackburn, Danielle V. Evans, Sandra Cisneros, ZZ Packer, Banana Yoshimoto, Carolyn Ferrel, Julia Alvarez, and Toni Cade Bambara, among so so so many others.

sheena daree romero is a humorist and doodler. Her essays and stories have received a Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellowship, won the Miriam Chaikin Prose Award, and made the Longreads Readers’ Best of List. sheena’s doodles and collages have been exhibited at the Massillon Museum and Urban Arts Center and featured in zines and anthologies. sheena is a graduate of The New School’s MFA in Creative Writing program, lives in Washington Heights, teaches first-year writing, and is a research resident at the Lesbian Herstory Archives.