Eva Longoria's push to get more kids reading in book deserts
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Eva Longoria at an event in Washington in 2019. Photo: Paul Morigi/Getty Images
Eva Longoria is helping launch an initiative to get more books in the hands of kids who live in "book deserts."
Why it matters: A book desert is an area or town where reading materials are hard to obtain.
- Having fewer things to read can hurt a child's academic development, especially if the book desert is an area also hit by poverty, according to a 2021 study from the nonprofit organization Room to Read.
- The initiative, Mott's Snacks & Stories, officially launched today, with books chosen to spotlight diverse authors.
What she's saying: "It's very hard to have access to a certain amount of books, and even harder to have access to diverse authors and stories and characters in books," Longoria tells Axios Latino, adding she hopes families who get the free books in the program are exposed to authors they maybe wouldn't have heard of otherwise.
- "It's important not only to have access to these books but to different cultures and communities, to see all these characters' different skin color and voice," she says.
- "At this time in our country more than ever we need this bus and a hundred more like it to go around and give that access to these families," Longoria adds.
Details: Mott's, Penguin Random House and Longoria teamed up to launch the program, which provides vouchers for up to 16 books to people who buy Mott's fruit snacks.
- A mobile library bus will also be set up outside grocery stores in book deserts, including in parts of San Antonio and Chicago, for read-alongs and to give the books to children.
- The books include "De Colores and Other Latin American Folksongs for Children" by bilingual educator José-Luis Orozco; Isabel Quintero's "My Papi Has a Motorcycle," about a girl traveling through her mostly immigrant neighborhood with her dad; and "Coquí in the City," written and illustrated by Nomar Perez, about moving from Puerto Rico to the U.S. mainland.
The big picture: About 10% of children's and teens' books published last year were written by a Latino or Latina, an increase from the previous year's average of 7%, according to statistics from the Cooperative Children's Book Center at the University of Wisconsin.
