Dolly Parton began mailing free books to children in her hometown 30 years ago. Each year, her Dollywood Foundation’s Imagination Library program sends a book every month to more than three million preschoolers in five countries, instilling a love of reading at the earliest opportunity. Photo courtesy of the Dollywood Foundation

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Every month, when Eris Doweary’s 4-year-old daughter sees a book arrive in the mail, she “gets excited,” her mother said. 

“She’ll yell at me, ‘Mommy, I got a new book!’” said the D.C. resident. “It’s a treat for her when the books come into the house.” 

Doweary’s daughter, who has been receiving free books from Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library since she was born, started reading when she was just two years old. 

“My daughter can read because of Dolly Parton. She is the real deal,” Doweary said of the Grammy-winning country singer. 

Tribute to Parton’s father 

As Dolly Parton fans may know, she grew up in a poor family with 11 brothers and sisters in eastern Tennessee. 

Her father, Robert Lee Parton, was one of 15 children, and although he was intelligent (“horse sense,” Parton calls it), he never learned to read, which embarrassed him throughout his life.  

When Dolly was 49 years old, she decided to donate books to preschool children in the hopes that they would learn to read early in life.  

“I said, ‘Daddy, I’m going to start something that you’re going to have to help me with,’” Parton told a live audience in 2022. 

The program started small in 1995, mailing books to households in her hometown community of Sevier County. 

“My dad and I thought that this would be something that would go maybe a county, maybe two or three counties over,” she said. “We had no idea when we started this that it was going to become what it has become.” 

Now celebrating its 30th year, the Imagination Library has mailed more than 270 million books to children in America, Canada, the UK, Ireland and Australia.  

More than three million children in those countries currently receive monthly books from the program, which starts at birth and continues until the child turns five. 

“Over the past three decades, Dolly’s vision has ignited a passion for reading in children across five countries,” said Tracy Long, director of marketing and development at the Dollywood Foundation, which manages the program.  

“We look forward to inspiring even more children to imagine, dream and grow. As Dolly always says, ‘You can never get enough books into the hands of enough children.’” 

Although her father died in 2000, Parton said, “My dad got to live long enough to see it through, and he got such a big kick out of hearing the kids call me The Book Lady.” 

How the program works 

The books are completely free for families. But the program isn’t available everywhere; a few more than 3,000 partners help cover the costs of the Imagination Library.  

Most partners are state governments or local libraries that shoulder at least part of the cost of the books themselves. The Dollywood Foundation covers the cost of shipping and other administrative services.  

For instance, Washington, D.C. pays $25 per child per year in its partnership with Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, which it calls Books from Birth. Since the program launched locally in 2016, 3,250,800 books have been delivered to children living in the District. 

Recently, some states have balked at the program’s cost. Indiana Governor Mike Braun last month proposed cutting his state’s 50% funding match for Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. Instead, his wife, Maureen Braun, has pledged to raise private funds to continue the program. 

The Imagination Library’s book selection staff, based in Tennessee, selects the titles and pre-orders them from the publisher, Penguin. The shrink-wrapped, age-appropriate books include a special guide on the inside flap with questions and talking points to engage preschoolers. 

Exactly what books do kids receive? Classics like The Very Hungry Caterpillar and The Little Engine That Could are on the list, as well as books like Look out Kindergarten, Here I Come! and Parton’s 1994 children’s book, Coat of Many Colors, which extrapolates on her famous 1971 song of the same name. 

Coat of Many Colors was the book Parton read aloud to a group of D.C. children in March 2018. She made a personal appearance at the Library of Congress that year when the program hit 100 million books, reading to rapt preschoolers seated on mats at her high-heeled feet.  

Sign up your grandkids 

Parents, guardians and even grandparents can register children via Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library website, as long as the child or grandparent lives in an area with a local affiliate.  

“My grandson and I love getting these books,” Robin Murphy, a blind grandmother, told the library last year. “I receive each book with all the print and with braille layover so I can read the book [in Braille] and he can also see the book. Very amazing,” she wrote. 

Grandfather Lloyd Kerr told the library that his granddaughter “developed a love for books thanks in large part to you and all the others involved in Dolly’s program…We spend time every day reading. She gets excited when she receives a new book from you and insists on sitting on my lap and reading it several times.” 

Many local communities have reported that the program helps inspire an early love of reading. In fact, the Dollywood Foundation reviewed 20 years of research on the program’s implementation and found that “the program is extremely popular in the communities where it’s implemented and shows promise in promoting changes in home literacy environments, children’s attitudes toward reading, and early literacy skills,” according to its website. 

Each child receives as many as 50 books before kindergarten. Doweary attributes her daughter’s early reading to the free books her daughter has amassed.  

“I started reading to her when she was an infant, and she started sounding out words and reading things on her own, and from then on she was just reading to me at bedtime,” Doweary said. 

Although Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library has been around for 30 years, some parents still don’t know about it, Doweary said, so she tries to spread the word. 

“I always recommend it to other parents, especially the ones with younger kids, because it helps so much.” 

In addition to Washington, D.C., there are Imagination Library affiliates providing free books to children in Fairfax and Loudoun Counties in Virginia, and in Montgomery, Prince George’s, Anne Arundel and Howard counties in Maryland, among others. For more information, visit ImaginationLibrary.com or ask your local library.