May 03, 2023
State Strategies
Families with young children in many Arizona communities can now register for Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, a program that mails free books to children every month, from birth to age 5.
Read On Arizona is coordinating the statewide expansion of Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library to serve thousands more young children in primarily rural and high-need communities where the program was not previously available.
More than 8,000 young children have been enrolled since the expansion launched late last year.
Visit ImaginationLibrary.com/check-availability/ to see if the program is available in your area and register your child to receive free books.
For more details and answers to frequently asked questions, visit the Arizona Department of Education’s Imagination Library webpage.
Families can also send an email to DPIL@readonarizona.org for additional assistance.
Providing access to high quality books at home
Reading is vital to a child’s ability to learn and be successful in school, and the skills needed to be a good reader start developing from birth. Having a selection of books at home is an important way to support language and early literacy.
Dolly Parton created the Imagination Library program to inspire kids to love to read. Children registered for the Imagination Library program receive a free, age-appropriate, hiqh-quality children’s book by mail every month until their fifth birthday.
“In the beginning, my hope was simply to inspire the children in my home county,” said Dolly, “but here we are today with a worldwide program that gives a book a month to well over 1 million children.”
DPIL expansion in Arizona
As a result of historic investments from Congress to ensure access to high-quality child care, and stabilize and support child care providers, the Governor’s Office and the Arizona Department of Economic Security Division of Child Care has dedicated funding from its federal COVID-19 relief funds for accelerating access to early childhood literacy, including the statewide expansion of Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, which served approximately 11,000 children in select Arizona communities last year. Additionally, 200 early learning sites across Arizona received a specially-selected set of 28 high-quality children’s books to help support early literacy in their programs.
The DPIL expansion in Arizona is a partnership among The Dollywood Foundation, the Arizona Department of Economic Security, the Arizona Department of Education, the United Way of Tucson and Southern Arizona, and Read On Arizona.
Download and share the Imagination Library AZ Info Sheet.
About Dolly Parton's Imagination Library
Since launching in 1995, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library has become the preeminent early childhood book-gifting program in the world. The flagship program of The Dollywood Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, has gifted nearly 200 million free books in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and The Republic of Ireland. The Imagination Library mails more than 2 million high-quality, age-appropriate books each month to enrolled children from birth to age five. Dolly envisioned creating a lifelong love of reading and inspiring children to dream more, learn more, care more and be more. The impact of the program has been widely researched and results suggest positive increases in key early childhood literacy metrics. Penguin Random House is the exclusive publisher for Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. For more information, visit imaginationlibrary.com.
Updated September 2023
