A book for everyone

High school English teacher Larry Abrams loves to read. But the bookworm never realized just how lucky he was to grow up around literature – until he discovered many of the students in his under-resourced school had never owned a book of their own.

• “I’d heard of food deserts," he shared, "but I’d never heard of book deserts. And it occurred to me that I teach in a book desert." 

📚 Taking action... In 2017, Larry reached out online to see if any of his friends and family had old children's books they would be willing to donate to his students. They started flooding in by the thousands. 

• Larry is the now the owner and founder of non-profit organization BookSmiles, which has collected, sorted, and distributed hundreds of thousands of books throughout New Jersey and the Philadelphia area – and will soon reach 1 million.🤯