When I was in the second grade my school hosted a Right to Read Week, a competition where every student competed for who could read the most hours in a single week– I was determined to win. So, I read books for three hours every day for the entire week on my quest to win the contest. Not only did I win, but I did so by a substantial amount. The day I won, and got a giant trophy and my picture in the newspaper, I was the happiest little girl in the world.
Reading has always been my favorite thing; it’s been my safe space, my shoulder to lean on, and my home away from home. Reading feels as necessary as breathing air, I cannot exist without it. I’ve been lucky enough to have been exposed to books my entire life, it started with the picture books my parents read to me as a kid–and me begging for them to read even more, then it was the longer books that my mom read to me as I feel asleep such as The Chronicles of Narnia, Little Women, and Anne of Green Gables. However, the books I was desperate to get my grubby little hands on were the ones that I read for myself. The Rainbow Fairy books, Geronimo Stilton Mysteries, and young reader comic books were some of my favorites. The rate at which I was reading led me to the library- again, and again, and again. Summer reading challenges became my personal Olympics, I was even on a first-name basis with many of the librarians. The library was everything I ever imagined, full of stacks of books that could take me wherever I wanted to go.
When I moved in the fifth grade, it was the library that helped me to feel like my world hadn’t totally crumbled. My new town had an even bigger library which meant, of course, even more books. In a place where I didn’t know anyone, the new library was my very first friend. I also was lucky enough to have one of the best teachers in the world for fifth and sixth-grade English. I met one of my best friends in that class and started to feel safer and more secure in myself and my new place all because of the love and kindness she showed our whole class. In high school, and even after graduation, it would be this same teacher who helped encourage me to follow a path in English Literature. At so many turns in my life, it has been words and stories that have caught me and held me up and helped me to continue forward.
In high school, my English teachers quickly became some of my favorites, they were some of the most influential people in my life. They encouraged me to keep writing and dreaming, and of course reading. These same teachers exposed me to so much more literature than a girl from suburban Ohio had even fully realized existed–I read my favorite Shakespeare play Julius Caesar for the first time, I fell in love with Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and just before I made my decision to commit to Pitt I read August Wilson’s Fences. Because of my high school teachers, I came to begin to better understand what it meant to read more widely, to actively seek out better and wider representation. When I went to college there was never a huge question of what I was going to do, it was always English. In my first class of my freshman year, Representing Adolescence, we were assigned The Hunger Games. I brought my well-worn copy from fifth grade, with my childhood handwriting and my old address scrawled on the front. From the moment I read that on the syllabus, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I had made the right choice. And that’s not to say there haven’t been many bumps along the way, or times I was frustrated with my course of study, or so much confusion on what I even want to do as a job for the rest of my life. However, it is to say that I’m deeply in love with reading and I wouldn’t change it for the world. I have spent my entire life loving books and I can’t wait to spend the rest of it doing the same.
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