The Revolutionary Power of Storytelling: Children’s Literature

9:00-10:30am Scholarship on Jean D’Costa

• “Jean D’Costa’s Children’s Literature: Bringing the Child Home”, Betsy Nies, University of North Florida

• “The Art and Archive of Jean D’Costa”, Tzarina Prater, Bentley University

10:45am-12:00pm “The Politics of Children’s Literature,” Jean D’Costa

12:00-1:00pm “Artivism: Art as a Tool of Empathy, Empowerment, and Protest”, Nikkolas Smith

1:00-2:00pm Book-signing with Nikkolas Smith + lunch break

Light lunch provided for registrants

2:15-3:15pm Escape to Last Man Peak: The Film

Tanya Batson-Savage and Analisa Chapman, founders of Have a Bawl Productions and producers of the film adaptation of D’Costa’s novel Escape to Last Man Peak (Via Zoom)

3:30-5:00pm On Writing for Caribbean Children

A reading and discussion with Olive Senior and Jean D’Costa, moderated by Courtney Taylor.

Jean D’Costa is a scholar of linguistics and literature who played a key role in bringing the study of creole language to the University of the West Indies in Jamaica and literature written in Jamaican creole into the Jamaican school system. Her YA novel Sprat Morrison (1972) was the first Jamaican children’s novel introduced into the Jamaican school curriculum which occurred in 1972. Her work continues to be part of the regional Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) curriculum. In addition to Sprat Morrison, she wrote two other young adult novels, Escape to Last Man’s Peak (1976) and Voice in the Wind (1978). She also wrote books for younger children, seven to ten years: Caesar and the Three Robbers (1996), Duppy Tales (1997), and Jenny and the General (2006). With Velma Pollard, she co-edited, Over Our Way: A Collection of Caribbean Short Stories for Young Readers (1980). A testament to the resilience and impact of her children’s fiction, which for generations was the first time Caribbean children saw/heard their voices in print, is the upcoming adaptation of Escape to Last Man Peak (1975) that will be directed by Nile Saulter and produced by Tanya Batson-Savage and Analisa Chapman of Have a Bawl Productions. For her work in the fields of children’s literature and linguistics, she was awarded the Children’s Writers Award from the Jamaican Reading Association in 1976, the Gertrude Flesh Bristol Award by Hamilton College in 1984, and the Jamaica Silver Musgrave Medal by the Institute of Jamaica in 1994.  

D’Costa is also a prominent scholar of linguistics. The first West Indian faculty in the English Department at the University of the West Indies where she taught from 1962 -1977, she developed curricular innovations that challenged British colonial models of education, such as her course on Creole language studies (1964-1965). She subsequently was professor of English at Hamilton College from 1980 to 1998. Her publications in linguistics include co-edited collection Caribbean Literary Discourse: Voice and Cultural Identity in the Anglophone Caribbean (2014) with Barbara Lalla and Velma Pollard, Language in Exile: Three Hundred Years of Jamaican Creole (2009) and Voices in Exile: Jamaican Texts of the 18th and 19th Centuries (2009) with collaborator Barbara Lalla. 

Have a Bawl Productions,  co-founders Analisa Chapman and Tanya Batson-Savage are the producers for a feature-length film adaptation of D’Costa’s Escape to Last Man Peak (dir. Nile Saulter).   They will show an excerpt from the film and discuss the production and their reasons for making the film.

            Tanya Batson-Savage has written for the stage, screen and radio.Her play Woman Tongue received 8 Actor Boy Award Nominations (2016) and her short film script Endeavour earned Best Script in the KingstOOn Animation Festival (2013). She authored Pumpkin Belly and Other Stories and was a senior writer for the radio serial Outta Road (2005 – 2007). She is a Fellow of the Calabash International Writing Workshop and Cropper Residential Workshop and has successfully completed workshops in script development and screenwriting.

Tanya was producer and script editor of the award-winning animated short Agwe (2019), and Assistant Production Manager on the short This City of Mine directed by Danielle Russell. Tanya is also the screenwriter of our company’s current projects in development and was a project team finalist for the 2021 SFFilm Rainin Grant as the screenwriter and one of the producers for the feature film project Escape to Last Man Peak.

            Analisa Chapman holds a Bachelor of Arts and is an experienced intellectual property and entertainment attorney. She has also worked as an entertainment reporter and junior public relations account executive. She has worked as a producer and production manager for music videos, talk-show radio, theatre and short films. She has been an awardee for the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission’s screenwriting competition. Analisa is an alumnus of the acclaimed IFFR Rotterdam Lab and an active member and the immediate past president of the Jamaica Film and Television Association. She was also a project team finalist for the 2021 SFFilm Rainin Grant as one of the producers for the feature film project Escape to Last Man Peak.

Dr. Nies’s early studies began in the elementary classroom where she became fascinated with teaching writing as a process. After completing her studies in composition and rhetoric in the Education Department at the University of Florida and the University of New Hampshire, she transferred to the UF English Department, where she pursued an M.A. and Ph.D. in English, focusing on American ethic literary traditions. In 1998, she brought her skills as a former educator to the University of North Florida classroom, teaching children’s and young literature, and ethnic American literature in addition to the broader field of twentieth-century American literature.  In 2017, she turned her attention to Caribbean children’s literature. Her latest edited work, an international collection of articles analyzing Caribbean children’s literature, provides the first large scale study of this region’s children’s literature. The two-volume anthology, Caribbean Children’s Literature: Histories, Pedagogy, and Publishing (Vol. I) and Critical Approaches (Vol. II), co-edited with Melissa García, was published by the University of Mississippi Press in June 2023. Winner of the 2025 Children’s Literature Association’s Edited Book Award, the collection offers a platform for Caribbean and international scholars to showcase the contemporary literature being produced in the region. It includes conversations with signature writers of the diaspora who now publish children’s books: Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat, and Olive Senior. It also engages in the publishing issues endemic to the region through interviews of local Caribbean children’s authors Tere Marichal (Puerto Rico), Ada Haiman (Puerto Rico), Joanne Hillhouse (Trinidad), and Diane Browne (Jamaica). Dr. Nies remains committed to deepening the field of teaching and scholarship surrounding underrepresented literatures for children and young adults.

Tzarina Prater is chair of the English and Media Studies Department of Bentley University, and she has taught a variety of courses in the disciplines of Literary and Cultural Studies, as well as courses intersecting with Gender and Digital Humanities. She has published articles on the work of Easton Lee, Kerry Young, Michelle Cliff, Patricia Powell, U.S. spectatorship of Hong Kong action cinema, digital platforms, Caribbean music, and science fiction.  

In addition to her book project, The Aleatory Nature of Things: Afterlives of Chinese Indenture in Jamaican Literary and Cultural Production, which considers how the relationship of Sino-Caribbean diasporic subjects to “Indenture” shapes contemporary cultural production, she will be acting as guest editor of a special issue on the work, life, and contributions of Jean D’Costa that is slated to be published in 2026. 

Olive Senior was born and brought up in Jamaica and educated in Jamaica and Canada. She is a graduate of Montego Bay High School and Carleton University, Ottawa. She started her career as a journalist with the Daily Gleaner and later entered the world of publishing. She was editor of two of the Caribbean’s leading journals – Social and Economic Studies at the University of the West Indies and Jamaica Journal, published by Institute of Jamaica Publications of which she was also Managing Director. She left Jamaica in 1989, spent some years in Europe and since 1993 has been based in Toronto. The Caribbean nevertheless remains the focus of her work, starting with her prizewinning collection of stories, Summer Lightning which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize followed by Arrival of the Snake-Woman and Discerner of Hearts. Her novel, Dancing Lessons was published by Cormorant Books in Canada 2011 and The Pain Tree, a collection of stories in the spring of 2015. Her illustrated children’s books are Birthday Suit, Anna Carries Water, and Boonoonoonous Hair. 

Jamaica’s 2021-2024 Poet Laureate, Senior is the award-winning author of eighteen books of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and children’s literature and other published work. Her many awards include Canada’s Writers Trust Matt Cohen Award for Lifetime Achievement, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, an honorary doctorate from the University of the West Indies and the Gold Medal of the Institute of Jamaica. Her work has been taught internationally and is widely translated. Olive Senior is from Jamaica and lives in Toronto, Canada, but returns frequently to the Caribbean which remains central to her work. Her work has been widely taught in schools and universities internationally. Summer Lightning has been a literature textbook in Caribbean schools and Gardening in the Tropics has been a poetry textbook for the CAPE syllabus. 

Nikkolas Smith is an Artivist, #1 NYT Bestseller picture book creator, and Hollywood film illustrator and concept artist (Judas and the Black Messiah, Space Jam II, Black Panther Wakanda Forever, They Cloned Tyrone, Sinners). He is the author/illustrator of several picture books: the USA TODAY Bestselling The Artivist, the NAACP Image Award nominated The Golden Girls of Rio, and My Hair is Poofy and That’s Okay. Nikkolas is the illustrator of the #1 NYT Bestselller The 1619 Project: Born on the Water, I Am Ruby Bridges, Black Panther Wakanda Forever: The Courage to Dream, Captain America: A Hero Looks Like You, the award winning That Flag, and the upcoming A Change is Gonna Come. His latest picture book The History of We is his first hand painted picture book. As a Black illustrator, Nikkolas is focused on creating captivating art that can spark important conversations in today’s world and inspire meaningful change towards social justice and equity. Many of his viral and globally published sketches are included in his book Sunday Sketch: The Art of Nikkolas. Known for his artistic depictions of marginalized voices, Nikkolas speaks and leads workshops on artivism at conferences and schools around the world. His passion for social justice into his unique portfolio of art, that spans from digital to acrylic, has made him one of the most recognized talents of our time. Born in Houston, Texas, Nikkolas lives in Los Angeles, California with his family.

Dr. Courtney Moore Taylor is an Assistant Instructional Professor within the African American Studies program. Taylor also serves as the Undergraduate Coordinator and Faculty Advisor for the student-led club, Sankofa Society.

Her research explores age and gender’s impact on antebellum enslavement. Research projects include “My Presus Girl: The Rites of Passage for the Adolescent Female Slave in the Antebellum South, 1800-1861,” “Death in the Pot: The State versus Poll and Lavinia,” “Sacrificial Lambs: Infanticide and Its Implications Concerning American Slavery” and “Female Slave Violence in Antebellum North Carolina and Virginia.”

Her most recent work, “A Badge of Slavery: Clothing and Enslaved Teenage Girls’ Identity Formation” appears in the August 2025 Journal of Southern History.

Regarding her teaching experience, Dr. Moore Taylor has taught courses in both American History and African American Studies, classes include American History Survey Courses, Introduction to African American Studies and the African American Studies Senior Seminar. Prior to joining the African American Studies Faculty at the University of Florida, Taylor served as a history professor at Santa Fe College.

November 7, 2025 from 6-7pm at the Lynx Bookstore (601 South Main Street, Gainesville, FL 32601

Paradise Once (Akashic 2025) is a sweeping historical novel that brings to life the resiliency of the indigenous Taíno people of the Caribbean, whose culture was virtually destroyed within two generations of their “discovery” by Christopher Columbus in 1492. In 1513 in Cuba, an entire village is wiped out by Spanish forces for no discernible reason. Had the villagers offended their spiritual guides―the cemíes―as one faction claimed, by incorporating foreign practices? Four youthful survivors escape the massacre―three Indigenous and one African runaway. They start off on separate perilous paths, not knowing they have been chosen by the cemíes to carry out a sacred mission―to ensure the survival of a Sacred Bundle that will enable a Taíno revival in future generations. But first, an epic spiritual battle must be played out. In this love song to the Caribbean, Olive Senior authentically evokes the physical and spiritual worlds of its First Peoples and the survivors―Indigenous and African―who will become the resistance fighters known in history as Cimarrones or Maroons.

November 8, 2025 at the Alachua County Public Library Main Branch, 10:30 to 11:30 AM

Smith speaks to the participants about his journey as an Artist and his relationship with Superheroes. Smith will guide attendees with some tips while he draws something as well.

September/October 2025, details TBA

Session on the work of Jean D’Costa’s Escape to Last Man Peak to be held in September 2025 and of Olive Senior’s picture books in October 2025. These readings will be open to the public, held via Zoom. Jean D’Costa will participate. Maryam Khorasani and Shuya Su, both doctoral students in the English department specializing in children’s literature will convene the reading group.

Contact Leah Rosenberg for more details.