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There are several unique focuses for 2025. I covered the first 12 in Part One. The following are the rest I have discovered for this year. As with all issues of LEEP Ink, the following descriptions are a...
We've arrived at another new year; the older I get, the more frequently they come. When I was younger, years seemed to take a long time to pass. Now, they're just a blip—here and gone. For ma...
21 Themes and 'Year of' Events for 2025 PART ONE, THE FIRST 12 Every year, various organizations announce the theme for the year. These themes can focus on causes, such as aesthetics and color tre...
DL Mullen, owner of Chicago's Semicolon Bookstore, launched National Black Literacy Day in 2021 to coincide with the month of Fredrick Douglass' birth and death to encourage more reading amongst black and brown youth. His initiative aims to address illiteracy rates in Chicago, especially among Black and brown communities, coincides with Black History Month.
Mullen's petition to Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Governor J.B. Pritzker seeks to gain wider recognition for the holiday. The day encourages community engagement in literacy programs, with Semicolon's #ClearTheShelves program playing a pivotal role by distributing free books to young readers. Mullen emphasizes the responsibility of Black-owned bookstores in fostering community literacy and hopes other bookstores will participate in promoting literacy and access to literature.
Between 2012 and 2014, various surveys indicated that an average of 23% of Black adults and 34% of Hispanic adults in the United States possessed low literacy skills. These literacy challenges have various causes, including historical abuse, inequalities, lack of education, and English not being a native language.
It is possible to be literate in one language and illiterate in another. Literacy in English is particularly difficult for people from non-Latin language backgrounds where the words, letters, and sentence structure differ entirely from their native language. To people from Russia, Asia, Greece, and many islands, as well as indigenous and African tribes that do not have an alphabet, English writing and grammar rules are very strange. Literacy has little to do with intelligence and everything about opportunity and familiarity. Most Americans would find themselves illiterate in other countries if they were to travel or emigrate, too.
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