Leonardo da Vinci
Sorry Snail

Creating Reading Rainbow: The Untold Story of a Beloved Children’s Series

Reading Rainbow is one of the most successful PBS children’s series in television history, earning numerous national and international awards including 26 Emmys and a Peabody Award. But perhaps more important than anything else, Reading Rainbow helped generations of children cultivate a love for books.

Reading Rainbow is very much a story of humble beginnings and enormous perseverance. Over five summers, Tony Buttino Sr. and his colleagues at WNED-TV, the public television station in Buffalo, New York, worked in collaboration with educators and librarians to experiment with summer reading programs. But after trialing these programs, the WNED team realized there was a big need for a new children’s literacy series and believed they could create a new show with local and national collaborators and friends. After fits and starts, and enough twists and turns to fill a children’s book, Reading Rainbow premiered in the summer of 1983 and captured the attention of 6.5 million young viewers.

Creating Reading Rainbow explores the many intriguing and homespun stories that, when woven together, reveal how this groundbreaking and iconic television series came to be. What led to the series being called “Reading Rainbow”? How did the road to Reading Rainbow wind its way through Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood? How did a public television station in Buffalo spearhead a movement in education and spark the passion for reading in millions of children? And, what does lasagna have to do with it?

More Non-Juvenile Books

  • "In the ongoing contest over which dystopian classic is most applicable to our time, Octavia Butler's 'Parable' books may be unmatched."--The New Yorker

  • In Poverty, by America, Matthew Desmond explores the paradox of poverty in one of the wealthiest nations, revealing how affluent Americans contribute to the plight of the poor while benefiting from systemic inequalities. Through a blend of historical analysis and original reporting, Desmond argues for a collective effort to address poverty and envisions a future where shared prosperity and true freedom are attainable for all.

    Read More about "Poverty, by America"...

  • A stunning visual homage to Black bookstores, featuring a selection of shops around the country alongside essays that celebrate the history, community, activism, and culture these spaces embody, with an original foreword by Nikki Giovanni. Black literature is perhaps the most powerful, polarizing force in the modern American zeitgeist. Today—as Black novels draw authoritarian ire, as Black memoirs shape public debates, as Black polemics inspire protest petitions—it’s more important than ever to highlight the places that center these stories: Black bookstores. Traversing teeming metropolises and tiny towns, Prose to the People explores a these spaces, chronicling these Black bookstore’s past and [...]

  • Velma Wallis shares the love, loss, and struggle that mark her coming of age in a two-room cabin at Fort Yukon, Alaska, where she is born in 1960.