In the children’s book Celeste Saves the City, a young girl named Celeste wants to know what went wrong as she watches Hurricane Katrina wreak havoc on her hometown of New Orleans, forcing her family to evacuate.
After returning home, Celeste knows she wants to help. So, she decides to dedicate her life to solving the city’s infrastructure problems as a civil engineer.
And yes, Celeste is just a character in a book. But her story isn’t entirely fictional. The book’s author, Courtney Kelly, also lived through Hurricane Katrina and asked many of the same questions Celeste does in the book.
“When my family was evacuating, I was questioning a lot, like, ‘Why are we having to evacuate? Why do we feel like we were ill-prepared for what was about to happen?’” said Kelly, P.E., M.ASCE, now an adjunct professor at Southern Methodist University, construction project director at H.J. Russell & Company, and member of ASCE’s Construction Institute Board of Governors.
The next summer, her experience in STEM camps offered some answers.
“That's what really led me to civil engineering, learning about the different disciplines at our camps and seeing the throughline of civil engineering and how understanding the principles behind civil engineering would allow me to impact New Orleans in a positive way one day,” she said.
Kelly’s inspiration to write the Celeste series came not only from her childhood, but from her early career talks with students, when she “noticed that there wasn’t a good working definition of civil engineering” or of her discipline, construction management.
“I'd often get asked, ‘Do you operate the jackhammer?’ No, that's not my job,” Kelly said. “Even on a site, that's not one of the main focal points of what we do in construction. So, I felt that I needed to find a way to get to kids earlier with this terminology and an understanding of what it was that I actually did.
“My books are really focused on trying to encourage the next generation to pursue careers in construction and engineering, and particularly for children of color to see themselves doing what I'm doing right now,” Kelly said.
This realization – and tireless hard work – led to the release of Celeste Saves the City in 2022.
“What's key in this book is that it explains to kids in a very easy to digest level what civil engineering is,” Kelly said. “I've read the books to five-year-olds, and at the end they're like, ‘Oh, I want to be a civil engineer like Celeste.’”
The series has grown since Celeste Saves the City.
In 2024, Kelly published the second installment in the series, Celeste Tunnels Underground. Celeste Paves the Way, the next book in the collection, is slated for release this summer and Celeste will tackle the challenge of paving a runway at an airport.
Her company, Courtney Kelly Books, recently hit a major milestone of 6,000 copies sold.
And people are starting to notice: Essence magazine recently published a big feature on Kelly’s books and entrepreneurship journey (her company is also a partner on the publication’s newly created WeLoveUs.Shop platform.)
“When I think about thousands of kids reading and listening to my books across the globe, it makes me feel like I'm doing my part to make the world a better place and inspire the next generation,” Kelly said.
A long road to publishing
The publishing process wasn’t easy for Kelly. Although she came up with the idea for Celeste Saves the City in 2017, it was not published until five years later.
“After I put the manuscript together, I thought it was the best thing ever, and I sent it to a bunch of publishing companies. It got rejected,” Kelly said.
“The manuscript sat on the back burner for a few years until 2020,” she continued. “I don't know how else to describe it besides a voice telling me, ‘Hey, it's time for you to get that book out into the world.”
When the second wave of inspiration hit, Kelly decided to self-publish, something she initially wanted to avoid due to potential pitfalls associated with this process.
“It's definitely a challenge being self-published because you just don't have that big brand name backing you,” she said. “I was starting from scratch. Nobody knew of Courtney Kelly Books.”
Many bookstores and schools even have restrictions on self-published books.
“It was kind of difficult trying to figure out: Who is allowing self-published authors to be in their stores or in their schools. Who is not? Out of the ones who are, how do you make an inroad? Because again, I don't have a big name backing me,” she continued.
Another challenge that came with her choice to self-publish was finding an illustrator.
“I would reach out to different illustrators whose artwork I liked, and I would get either no answer or rejected again,” Kelly said.
What kept Kelly motivated was the confidence she had built in her civil engineering career.
“I realized that if I can take blueprints and drawings and create something in a built environment, then I would just need to apply those same skills to building this book from a manuscript into an actual physical book that people can read,” she said.
She continued to reach out to illustrators despite the odds and eventually connected with Erin Nielson.
Nielson, whose illustrative work usually focuses on whimsical topics like animals, fantasy, and magic, was drawn to the Celeste series for two reasons: the uniqueness of a children’s book about civil engineering and the necessity of the story.
“I married into a family of engineers and so it felt like bridging those two interests to illustrate a book about engineering,” she said.
“The other thing was working with Courtney,” she continued. “When the first book came out, a story about a black woman in STEM was much needed; it still is. And it was a story that was needed and done by someone who was passionate and had done it well.”
Kelly’s passion, said Nielson, stuck out and made the story authentic.
The process of bringing everything together was driven by open communication and collaboration.
First, Kelly would send Nielson a “90% complete” manuscript and storyboard as well as reference images and videos.
“I always like to leave room because something's going to happen creatively between the words that I've written and the things that she's going to draw throughout the process,” said Kelly.
Then Nielson would send black and white sketches, Kelly would either approve them or suggest edits, Nielson would send color sketches, and they would continue going back and forth until they had a final product.
Once Celeste Saves the City was complete, the book took on a life of its own.
Celeste becomes a role model
Kelly has held numerous readings and events for Celeste Saves the City and Celeste Tunnels Underground worldwide. And she has already seen the impact they’ve had on children.
“What is happening immediately is that kids are seeing a lightbulb go off through this understanding of civil engineering and construction and how they can apply it to society, how they can learn something that benefits other people,” she said.
Kelly started off doing events in New Orleans and Dallas, where she was confident children would be able to grasp the concepts in the Celeste series quickly because of the familiar locations in the books. She also hosted events in Germany, where she still had “a leg up” since they took place on American military bases.
She even hosted a three-part events series in Singapore. But there, she didn’t have that sort of familiarity to stand on.
“To go to Singapore, where no one even knew about me or had seen the books beforehand, walk into a room with strangers, and have kids connect so quickly was pretty fantastic,” she said.
During an event at a local library, Kelly read Celeste Saves the City to the children, who were then instructed to create their own barrier island designs – a task that was received with enthusiasm.
“They immediately took on the concept and started building these barrier islands and explaining, ‘Well, I built mine tall because the waves are going to hit the wall and I want the waters to be repelled back into the ocean,” said Kelly. “They get it, and to see their parents being intentional with them, prompting them to what they are designing was great to see.”
The other two events in Singapore were bilingual in nature, featuring translations of the books in French and German – two of the three additional languages in which the series has now been published. And she doesn’t plan to stop there.
Celeste is still growing up
Since she self-published, Kelly took a break from tradition by having the main character grow up in Celeste Saves the City.
“That was something I intentionally put into the book because so many of our young girls especially start losing confidence that they can actually do things like math and science as they get older,” Kelly said.
“There's one spread where Celeste is a little girl and she's coloring a page with construction equipment on it, then she gets older and she's reading a book with a mechanic on it. Then she turns into an adult and she's reading harder books,” Kelly said. “I did that to showcase to the kids that, yes, you can do these things when you're little, but you can also continue to do them as you get older, even if they get harder.”
In the second installment of the series, Celeste Tunnels Underground, Celeste is now older and is working on an underground tunnel to help with traffic. She travels the world looking at engineering marvels, like the English Channel Tunnel and Fehmarnbelt Link, then comes back to Dallas to build her own.
There is still plenty more to Celeste’s journey. In the recently announced third installment, which is set for release in July 2026, Celeste will venture to Atlanta to pave a new airport runway.
“The long-term goal is that whether kids go into civil engineering or not, they take some life lessons from Celeste and that story stays with them, wherever they go in the future,” said Kelly.
