"Look, you can make a difference in your child’s life, just by reading to him for 30 minutes a day.”

Congratulations to Walter Dean Myers on being named the national ambassador for young people’s literature, a sort of poet laureate of the children’s book world.  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/books/walter-dean-myers-ambassador-for-young-peoples-literature.html?pagewanted=all

His message comes from his own experiences as an African-American man who dropped out of high school but built a successful writing career largely because of his life-long devotion to books. 

I applaud his message!

“ We’ve given children this idea that reading and books are a nice option if you want that kind of thing. I hope we can get over than idea.” I think that what we need to do is say reading is going to really affect your life. Hoping to speak directly to low-income minority parents, he wants to say:  ‘Look, you can make a difference in your child’s life, just by reading to him for 30 minutes a day.”