Books for Keeps blog

A guest post by Books for Keeps Board Treasurer Joe Hill

I remember when I first learned to love to read.  My father was stationed at Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, NC, and I was at Tabernacle Middle School in English class with our teacher Mrs. Hellmer.  There we learned to diagram sentences and if we could, we used all the adjectives in our spelling list to make unnecessarily long sentences which we would then have to diagram.  Mrs. Hellmer had a bookshelf full of fiction representing every genre and she would ask us to choose a book for recreational reading or a book report.  We had a library I suspect, but I don’t recall going there in middle school.  All I remember was her bookshelf and how because of it I discovered that reading was something that could be fun.

When it came time to choose my first book in middle school English, I remember thinking a book cover with dragons looked pretty cool.  So I started with Anne McCaffrey’s The Dragonriders of Pern.  I started with Dragonflight, then Dragonquest, The White Dragon, Dragonsong, Dragondrums and pored through most all of her Pern-based books.  My school was a little way out in Maysville and the bus ride with all the stops was at least a half hour. The long ride to school and home provided ample time to knock out a couple chapters.  I became a voracious reader in middle school due to the long bus ride and my access to that bookshelf.

These were the days of Waldenbooks and B. Dalton Booksellers, where every mall had at least one bookstore.  Both the comic shop and the bookstores were within bike-riding distance for me.  After a slice of [...]

Big news today out of Books for Keeps!

The Books for Keeps Board of Directors and Executive Director Leslie Hale are thrilled to announce the hiring of Athens resident and lifelong literacy advocate Rachel Watkins.

Rachel will take on the role of program manager, the second position ever filled here at Books for Keeps. It’s an exciting move by our organization as we launch an expansion to reach 15 additional schools in the next three to five years. Rachel will start work with Books for Keeps in January.

Read more about our plans to grow here.

Rachel was born and raised in Mississippi and came to Athens to earn her master’s degree in adult education in the early 1990’s. She spent ten years in Monterey, California, before moving back home to Athens in 2005. Rachel has four children in the Clarke County School District and has worked part-time at Avid Bookshop since August of 2011. Her husband is a paramedic in West Africa with International S.O.S.

Rachel is well known in Athens as an education advocate, a communicator, a networker, and a cheerleader for our community. She brings to Books for Keeps extensive experience in education, event planning, writing, community outreach, and – of course – literacy.

Read our press release announcing Rachel’s hiring here.

What better way to Throwback Thursday than to start where it all began? One person, one thought, one opportunity to make a change.

This was all only an idea in 2009, when our founder, Melaney Smith, decided to take a leap of faith and tackle an issue that had been nagging at her heart. When Melaney saw one child’s simple desire for an education, there was no turning back. Read on, and click the links in this post to learn more about the step-by-step process that gave birth to Books for Keeps.

With no books at home, and no access to a public library, many children lose the opportunity to learn and build on their reading skills during summer. What’s more, Melaney realized many of those children would actually lose reading skills entirely. Seeing this, Melaney took action that lead to a vast change in the lives of children across the community.

The idea of Books For Keeps came to Melaney six years ago when her niece, MK, first joined a local mentor program. MK noticed that the children she was mentoring could not afford the materials required to make the most of their education. It all started when MK overheard a little girl say, “I wish I had a book at my house.”

Some would have chosen to observe the situation and say, “someone should do something about this.” Well, Melaney decided to be that person. She took the situation into her own hands and said, “I am somebody. I can do something.” As Melaney began to build on this thought in her personal blog posts, she sought advice and ideas. These ideas led to the creation of an organization that has provided 185,000 books to children [...]

BFK Book Sale Preview Night
Get first crack at our amazing selection of used books – thousands of titles priced from 50 cents to $3.

Tickets – for Preview Night only – are $10. All preview night patrons will be entered into a door prize basket that includes autographed copies of books by local authors and a hand-made quilt (for snuggling up with a good book!) Can’t attend but still want to make a donation? Your name will be entered into a drawing for the door prize anyway.

When Trion Brown’s daughter, Z’mia, came bounding home with a tote bag full of books one day after school last spring, she was excited for her daughter, a kindergartener. But, she was also a little apprehensive.

“When I started seeing the princess books, I thought, ‘Oh, Lord, how am I going to afford all of these books?” Trion recalls. “We’re going to have to return these books and it’s going to break her heart.”

Then, Trion read the letter from tucked in with the books. It explained that the books were Z’mia’s to keep – from Books for Keeps. That they would help Z’mia’s brain expand and grow stronger during the summer. And, that every child in Z’mia’s school – all 400 students at Dunbar Elementary in Atlanta – got to pick out 12 books each and take them home, just like Z’mia, thanks to the efforts of Books for Keeps.

“She told me that she had picked them out herself,” Trion says. “She read the titles out to me. I knew that she could read, but I was amazed at how well she could read.”

That night, Trion and Z’mia read together all evening. They read until it was almost time to get up again, Trion jokes.

And then summer came, and Z’mia kept reading.

“This summer, she picked up books more than anything – more than a toy,” she says. “I don’t think her involvement in books would be as much if it weren’t for the books she got in the spring.”

And then fall came. When Z’mia entered the first grade, she received a reading assessment. Z’mia’s teacher was starting the process of putting students into groups according to their reading levels.

“Z’mia blew out all of the reading [...]