Write on target
Palmetto Electric’s Kaia Bishop (far left) and Sawyer Blakeley Costello teamed up to write The Electric Trail. Fairfield Electric’s Aydin Soner (right) won top individual honors for his superhero story, Captain Co-op, the New Assistant, and the Tornado.
Photos by Josh P. Crotzer
Connection to their local cooperatives and tapping into their creativity helped three young South Carolina students win the 2023 Children’s Book Challenge. A panel of independent judges selected books written and illustrated by Kaia Bishop, Sawyer Blakeley Costello and Aydin Soner among submissions from across the state, and the books will be published and distributed to South Carolina elementary schools this fall.
Sponsored by EnlightenSC—an educational initiative of the state’s electric cooperatives—the competition challenges fourth and fifth grade students to write and illustrate stories that focus on the impact of electricity in their lives, communities and state.
Bishop and Costello, fifth grade students at Hilton Head Island Elementary School for the Creative Arts, co-authored The Electric Trail, which was selected as a regional winner by their local co-op, Palmetto Electric, before advancing as a statewide finalist in the group category. The students split the contest’s $500 cash prize, and their teachers, Jennifer Friend-Kerr and Alexandria Holland, each received a $100 prize.
“This is an unbelievable program,” says Friend-Kerr, whose students have participated in the Children’s Book Challenge for the last three years. “I’ve seen students just grow and engineer and develop their imaginations through storytelling.”
Soner’s Captain Co-op, the New Assistant, and the Tornado won the individual division after claiming Fairfield Electric’s local contest. The homeschooled fourth grader in Columbia received a $500 cash prize, and his teacher, who also happens to be his mother, Kutina Williams, received a $100 prize.
Captain Co-op, the New Assistant, and the Tornado is about a superhero lineworker who teaches his new partner about co-ops as they restore power after a tornado.
“This is my first time getting a book published, so it’s exciting,” says Soner. “I hope the kids who read it think that it’s good and they learn something from it.”