WINNSBORO – A Fairfield Magnet School fourth grader is getting statewide recognition for creating an award-winning children’s book. Stella Grace Burroughs, 10, won the $500 top prize out of nearly 200 entries in the 2026 South Carolina Book Challenge, an extracurricular contest sponsored by the Electric Cooperatives of SC. Her book, The Day the Power Took a Vacation, is a creative re-imagining of her experiences during the power outage and storm damage of Hurricane Helene in 2024.
“Stella Grace has a vivid imagination, and she’s always been interested in art,” said Kimi Daly, Burroughs’ art teacher and mentor at the Fairfield Magnet School for Math and Science. “In third grade, she auditioned for my honors art group – kids who want to learn the harder stuff and want to compete. She spends a lot of time in the art room, experimenting with various materials and mediums. She’s always been an adorable little ball of energy.”
Burroughs, who lives in Winnsboro with her parents, Jonathan and Tiffiny, and little sister Meredith, said she was shocked when her win was announced at the school’s quarterly awards day on March 27.
“I was like, wow, this is a big life improvement! Then I started jumping around in circles. I was like, ‘this is happening!’” she said excitedly.
The contest, open to fourth and fifth graders, required students to write and illustrate an original 24-page children’s book on this year’s theme, “A day in the life of a lineman”. Burroughs spent four months on the project, in addition to her regular schoolwork and other after school activities like gymnastics and soccer.
“Stephanie Martin, at the Fairfield Electric Co-op, connected us with some phenomenal resources,” Daly said. “She helped Stella Grace learn more about what linemen do, what they wear, what tools they use and what they do every day.”
In her story, Burroughs imagines that the electrical power has “taken a vacation,” turning the outage into a playful story where the characters representing electricity are relaxing on a beach while she’s at home in the dark with a flashlight. Some of the scenes came from her memories of seeing downed trees and wires after the storm. The hero of the story is one of the linemen who are all saving the day by “helping power find its way back.” She dedicated the book to the memory of her uncle, who had worked as a lineman.
After Burroughs got the story written, she began designing the illustrations.
“First, I started sketching,” she said of her process. “Then I painted over them with acrylic paint. And then lined out all their details with a nice fine point Sharpie to make it stand out and see all their features.”
“She’s driven, and she’s a perfectionist,” Daly said, recalling how Burroughs kept wanting to add more detail and improve each page, even as the deadline approached. “After she turned it in, I thought she’d want to take a break for awhile! But the first thing she asked was, ‘when is the next contest?’”
