Roundtable - Imagining Justice: Creative Arts and Social Impact

How do the roles of ‘author’, ‘illustrator’, and ‘activist’ overlap? What does it mean to incorporate anti-racist praxis into writing, illustrating, and publishing books for young people? Is children’s literature shaping a more just, equitable future?

We are thrilled to announce STARYLs next event: ‘Imagining Justice: Creative Arts and Social Impact’. Join us for a roundtable discussion between emergent and established children’s authors and illustrators, as they share their professional experience of creating art and literature that engages with ideas of social change. Our conversation will ‘join the dots’ between academic approaches and practitioners' approaches to equity in children’s literature, with our international panel providing a wealth of perspectives and insights. There will also be an opportunity to ask our panel questions.

Our speakers will be (in order of the pictures, starting in the top left corner and going clockwise):

Maisie Chan: In 2016, Maisie was chosen for Megaphone, a brilliant project to find and assist new voices in children's publishing. She founded the Glasgow Children's Writers Group, facilitates the Bubble Tea Writers Group for writers of East Asian and Southeast Asian descent who have grown up in the UK, and is a BEATS screenwriting fellow. Her debut novel, Danny Chung Does Not Do Maths, will be published next month in the UK.

Elizabeth Lander: Elizabeth is a Caribbean illustrator and a finalist in both the 2016 Clyde & Co. Art Award and the 2015 'Find your Voice' competition organised by the London Business School. Her work is widely inspired by the world around her, especially architecture and culture. She uses her art to record the mundane by finding repetition and structure in the man-made world and would describe her style as documentary image-making.

Sahitya Rani: Sahitya is an experienced illustrator and visual designer with a demonstrated history of working in children's publishing. She is skilled in comic book art, storyboarding, children's book illustration, and visualisation. Sahitya is a strong arts and design professional with a Bachelor of Design focused on Animation Film Design from the National Institute of Design. She is the illustrator of Letters to Krisha (2020), Yamini and the 7:00PM Ghosts (2020), and Arun in Ruins (2021).

Susan Tan: While earning a Doctorate in Children's Literature at the University of Cambridge, Susan began writing the first book in her popular Cilla Lee-Jenkins series, Cilla Lee-Jenkins: Future Author Extraordinaire. The Cilla series is based on Susan's own family and deals with the questions, challenges, and many joys that navigating different racial and cultural identities can bring. She is currently teaching at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.