Jella Avant-Garde, 14, became the first African American to win the 90-year-old Scripps National Spelling Bee on Thursday, correctly spelling ‘muraya’, a species of plant, keeping calm after a near miss with a botanical word in the previous round.
The avant-garde is also an accomplished basketball player, holding several Guinness World Records for performing multiple basketball dribblings at a time.
It claimed the top prize of $50,000 after resting and joking with judges and arbitrators, despite its conflict with ‘Nepeta’, a term for another plant genus.