AP News, March 1st, 2007
With more than 12 million books sold last year alone, author James Patterson doesn't need to worry about getting the public to read him. But he does worry that people aren't reading enough.
Patterson's PageTurner Awards, given to organizations and individuals that help encourage literacy, will be announced Friday. Winners range from Pam Shelton, a librarian from Vermont who moved to Africa and founded the Botswana Book Project, to First Book, which has distributed thousands of books to low-income families in the United States.
"I just love it because it's helping people already out there doing a terrific job," Patterson, the prolific author (and co-author) of such best sellers as "Honeymoon" and "Step on a Crack," told The Associated Press. "It's neat when you have an idea and put it together and it really works."
The awards coincide Friday with the National Endowment for the Arts' "Read Across America" day.
Thirty-nine winners will receive PageTurner gifts totaling $500,000, with a top prize of $100,000 going to the Washington Center for the Book, a Seattle-based organization that helped inspire the nationwide wave of "One City, One Book" events. The center's program manager, Chris Higashi, says the gift almost equals her annual program costs.
"It's a validation for all of the work we do here to promote books and reading," Higashi says. "All of our activities and programming for the Center for the Book is dependent on private gifts and grants. So winning this award is a way for us to continue to do what we already do and believe in."
Other PageTurner recipients include the University of Minnesota's African-American Read-In, the All Hallows High School in New York City and 826 National, a San Francisco-based organization co-founded by author Dave Eggers that works with students throughout the United States.
Patterson has made a point of giving to others. He says that "50 to 60 percent" of his earnings will be bequeathed to educational organizations and he has donated thousands of books to soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The author says that he had been thinking about the PageTurner awards for a few years, but needed time to think about how such a project could be organized. He did not want a large foundation, with a board of directors, where administrative costs would run as high, or higher, than the prize money.
"I've never liked bureaucracy, so I do a lot with very few people," Patterson says, adding that a just a handful of people reviewed the more than 2,000 applications for the 2006 prizes. The author says he looked over submissions after they were narrowed to a final 200.
Organizations can nominate themselves or allow others to do so. Higashi of the Washington Center says she didn't know she had been nominated until she received the call informing her of the $100,000 prize.
"I did not plan for this," she says. "Basically, all I did was do my work and someone out there recognized it and nominated me. I am thrilled beyond belief."
