Early learning by the book

In February 2022, Katrina Gordon’s premature twin daughters were in the neonatal intensive care unit.

Gordon could not yet hold them.

“There were so many things coming at you; it was a very overwhelming situation,” she recalls.

At the hospital, they met with a child life specialist who helped them sign up for Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, a program that mails free books to children from birth until age 5.

At the time, Gordon did not think much of it. Then she began reading.

“Reading was the first way I was able to connect with my girls because I was not able to hold them,” Gordon says. “That was how we were able to form our first connection sitting between the incubators.”

More than four years later, books are still arriving.

Gordon’s daughters know when one belongs to them because it comes addressed in their names. When a new book arrives, they want to open it.

“They are excited to get their mail,” Gordon says.

Sometimes, she has to tell them to finish their nighttime routine first. The book will be waiting for bedtime.

The twins are among more than 4,700 children enrolled in the Imagination Library in Rochester. The program, founded by Parton through her Dollywood Foundation in her native Sevier County, Tenn., in 1995, sends enrolled children one free, developmentally appropriate book every month regardless of family income.

What began as a local program expanded across the United States and eventually into Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and Ireland. By the end of 2025, the program had distributed more than 300 million books worldwide.

Parton died Aug. 25 at age 80, a year after the Imagination Library celebrated its 30th anniversary.

In Rochester, the program she started is itself in a period of transition and growth.

United Way of Greater Rochester and the Finger Lakes formally assumed leadership of the local Imagination Library in April. Since then, program manager Lindsey Dailey says, 5,283 children in the city of Rochester have been served, nearly 740 children have joined the list of those enrolled, and more than 23,000 books have been mailed.

The organization hopes to take the program beyond the city. But the story of how it reached Rochester began with a pediatrician and a residency project.

Starting with one ZIP code

Matt Present M.D. was a pediatric resident when he began looking for a project related to health equity and the social factors affecting children’s health.

Before entering medicine, Present had worked at the Chicago Sun-Times. A former mentor and editor there had helped start an Imagination Library chapter in Chicago. Present began studying the program.

“It seemed worth it,” he says.

Present spent about a year making community connections and raising money. Rochester Education Foundation provided the nonprofit infrastructure needed to operate the program, and in the summer of 2021, the Rochester chapter enrolled its first participants.

The program started in 14605, a ZIP code that includes neighborhoods near the Rochester Public Market. Pediatric practices, including Strong Child and Adolescent Outpatient Services and Rochester General, helped connect families with the program.

Present was seeing the need in his own work. He remembers one family he met during a two-month well-child visit. The baby’s mother worked days and the father worked nights so someone could always be home with their child.

Present gave them a book and showed them ways they could use it to engage with their infant.

At the four-month visit, they told him they read the book all the time.

“I realized it was their way of saying it was the only infant book they had,” Present says.

For Present, providing more books seemed like an unusually straightforward intervention.

“We already have a mechanism which is the United States Postal Service,” he says. “There are so many problems that are really hard to solve.”

This one, Present thought, did not have to be. The program grew much faster than he anticipated.

Present expected what he calls “ground warfare”: raise enough money to add another ZIP code, then another, gradually working across Rochester.

“I had a five-year plan to go citywide,” he says.

Instead, word spread. Organizations and funders became involved. Early supporters included ESL, Canandaigua National Bank, M&T Bank and the Konar Foundation. State Sen. Jeremy Cooney also helped secure state support for the program.

About 18 months after the first children enrolled, Present realized citywide expansion was possible.

“I saw we can do this, we can do this right now,” he recalls.

Present also began discovering how much the books mattered to participating families. If a monthly book arrived late, he heard about it. Families wanted to make sure nothing had happened to their enrollment.

Present experienced the same anticipation in his own home. His children participated in the program, too.

“That was an event when they got their Imagination Library book,” he says.

Success created another problem. Present was still a physician with a full-time career and a family of his own. As the Imagination Library grew, so did the administrative work required to sustain it.

“I went from being a catalyst to becoming a bottleneck,” he says.

By 2024, Present was thinking about succession. He wanted the program to reach families beyond the city of Rochester eventually, but he no longer believed he was the person who could take it there.

“I really could not take it beyond the city limits,” Present says.

United Way organizations already operated Imagination Library programs in Albany and Syracuse. Present began conversations with United Way of Greater Rochester and the Finger Lakes, whose president and CEO, Jaime Saunders, was familiar with early-childhood initiatives.

Rochester Education Foundation supported the transition.

“It was the most seamless transition imaginable,” Present says.

“Ideally things outgrow you,” Present says, “and that happened exactly with this.”

Today, the local program covers 21 ZIP codes in the city of Rochester.

Registration forms are distributed through pediatric offices, day care facilities and community events. The books themselves are selected according to children’s ages and mailed directly to their homes.

Dailey, a former school social worker, says one of the biggest challenges now is simply making sure eligible families know the program exists.

Recent community events have produced new registrations, she says, but awareness remains a challenge.

Jane Miller has seen that firsthand.

A retired reading and special education teacher, Miller became an Imagination Library volunteer after seeing an opportunity advertised on Facebook. She has helped at school open houses, back-to-school events and community gatherings. She now calls families when books are returned as undeliverable.

Some parents initially wonder whether the program is a scam, Miller says. Others confuse it with borrowing books from a library. Language can create another barrier.

But Miller also hears from families when something goes wrong.

“We have been missing our books,” parents sometimes tell her.

Books in the home

Research on the Imagination Library has found positive associations between participation and some measures of early literacy, though the evidence does not show that receiving the books alone makes children kindergarten-ready.

A 2017 study examined 2,731 children entering kindergarten in the Syracuse City School District. Researchers found that children who had participated consistently in the Imagination Library for three or more years were more likely to meet a measure of kindergarten readiness than children who had not, even after researchers accounted for several demographic factors.

A 2021 study published in Pediatrics examined a Cincinnati program that combined the Imagination Library with Reach Out and Read, an initiative that incorporates literacy promotion into pediatric care. Literacy readiness among participating children improved across the three cohorts studied, although participants did not significantly outperform comparable children who were not in the combined program.

The authors concluded that combining guidance about reading during medical visits with increasing the number of books available at home could potentially improve kindergarten readiness.

In Gordon’s home, reading is part of the family’s routine.

On Sundays, they typically try to spend 20 minutes reading quietly. Her younger daughters have accumulated enough books of their own that they can choose what interests them.

They cannot yet read everything themselves.

Instead, Gordon says, “they make up their own stories about what they think is happening on the pages.”

The Imagination Library has also introduced the family to books Gordon says they probably would not have encountered otherwise.

“These books were not the typical Dr. Seuss things you may receive in a baby shower,” she says. “Every book we have received we have never heard of before.”

One favorite is “Roar-Choo!,” a story involving a dragon and a great deal of sneezing.

Another is “Belina Ballerina,” which Gordon’s oldest daughter came to know so well that she mouths the words while her father reads.

Gordon buys children’s books herself and finds others through community events, including Halloween giveaways at the Rochester Public Market. For her, the Imagination Library’s value isn’t simply that the books cost nothing.

They belong to her daughters.

“I love it,” she says.

She still has books from her own childhood.

For Dailey, success in the immediate future means enrolling more of the Rochester children who are already eligible, raising additional money (the Dollywood Foundation does not provide financial support for books, mailing costs, or operations) and eventually expanding the program geographically.

While the local program currently serves only the city, United Way’s larger footprint extends across six counties.

“What I would love to see is when the program goes countywide,” Present says.

If that happened, he says, hospitals could potentially make Imagination Library enrollment part of the paperwork families encounter after a child is born.

“It would be really great if one of the pieces of paper you got was a form to enroll in the Imagination Library,” Present says.

For him, the program also represents something increasingly uncommon before Parton’s death.

“Dolly Parton is the last person in America that everyone still likes,” Present said days before her death.

He pointed to Imagination Library programs operating in politically different places, from Tennessee and West Virginia to California and Illinois.

“It’s really cool to have a program in these fractured times where everyone understands its merits,” he says. “An example of the ways we can still find some common ground.”

Gordon hopes Parton’s death brings new attention to the program and that it eventually expands into communities surrounding Rochester.

“It is truly a great program and a resource parents have,” she says.

Her daughters will eventually age out. The monthly books will stop coming.

Gordon does not expect the books themselves to disappear. She has kept books from her own childhood and imagines her daughters doing the same.

“They will keep these books,” Gordon says, “and if they have children of their own when they are older they will be able to pass them down to their children.”

Austin Albanese is a Rochester-based writer and historian whose work focuses on local histories, civic memory, and interfaith life. 

The Beacon welcomes comments and letters from readers who adhere to our comment policy including use of their full, real name. See “Leave a Reply” below to discuss on this post. Comments of a general nature may be submitted to the Letters page by emailing [email protected].