Austin Peay State University's new Center for Literacy will partner with Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library of Montgomery County to support young readers and those who teach them, the school said.
"We want to develop literacy leaders in our community," Austin Peay associate professor Zack Barnes, a former special education teacher with Metro Nashville Public Schools, said in a news release. "These opportunities give teachers the time, support and resources to become experts in an area that matters to them and then share that expertise with their peers."
Barnes, the coauthor of "Executive Skills and Early Childhood Education: Developing Self-Regulation in Young Children," will serve as director of the Center for Literacy, housed in Austin Peay's
Eriksson College of Education.
Parton died Aug. 25. She founded the Imagination Library in 1995 in honor of her father, who could not read or write. The program that began in her home county in East Tennessee has grown into the largest early childhood free book program in the world. From 1995 to 2026, the organization has helped gift more than 330 million books to children worldwide, including 40 million books in 2025 alone.
The new literacy center, Austin Peay said, will "maintain a curated collection of children's literature for use in coursework and lesson planning, and it is building a repository of literacy-related assessments and data that doctoral students may access for dissertation research."
More than $55,000 in grants secured this year will support some of the center's first projects. A $49,884 grant from the Clarksville-Montgomery County Community Health Foundation will fund APSU's Govs Literacy Fellows Program.
The yearlong program will place Austin Peay education students in second-grade classrooms at four Title I elementary schools in Montgomery, Robertson and Cheatham counties. Fellows will spend three hours a week working on reading in small-group settings.
Austin Peay estimated the program will reach about 500 students, and each will receive a free book.
"Literacy is foundational to everything else students will learn," Eriksson College of Education Dean John McConnell III said in a statement. "By launching the Center for Literacy, we're making a commitment to our community that Austin Peay will be a leader in preparing teachers who understand foundational reading instruction and can put it into practice."
Molly Davis contributed reporting.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Austin Peay's new literacy center to team with Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library
