There are more than 60,000 copies of her best seller "Beka Lamb" in print and surely he timeless tale of Beka and Toycie has Been enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of readers around the world.
With all that, no one can deny the star power of internationally renowned Belizean author Zee Edgell who spoke at The final day of the education summit.
In an interview after her address, Edgell said forget more teachers, more classrooms, or a new curriculum; in the view of this English professor what Belize needs most urgently is to address the staggering rate of illiteracy.
Zee Edgell, Author
"I recommended that they establish a national literacy policy because the literacy rate is falling to such an extent that many children are not doing well academically in school and it has reached a crisis point. I tried to point out that if something is not done the class divisions in our country in ten years time will widen with disastrous social and economic consequences."
"My other recommendation was that we have a massive public education campaign to encourage those people who are able to read to their children from small to make it a habit of doing so. I realize that today many parents are not able to read because I have some good friends who may be able to write their names, which is not literacy, but they can't really read any kind of instructional manual for example. This is the reason why so many children are, especially the men, are in sort of trouble; they don't have that family support and they are not able to read."
"These things that I mentioned, including the marginalization of black men and the Mestizo men and all the other men, who are falling behind in the culture; many of them don't go on to high school and to college and what we are going to do? We need men to be there for the children and regardless of anything else they need to be home at night to help the mother read to the child at least for 15 minutes. You can't leave everything to the teachers; they have a great burden themselves but the parents can do a lot at home."
"...because children take their exams in English, some of the teachers here at the summit have mentioned that they themselves don't know when they are speaking English or when they are speaking Creole so some remedial work needs to be done in that area."
Edgell is an English Professor at Kent State University in Ohio.