Kick-Off Celebration For Dolly Parton Imagination Library This Sunday By Fawn Roark A kickoff event for the Dolly Parton Imagination Library will be held this Sunday, July 30, at Ashe County Park from 3 – 5 p.m. where local children (ages 0 – 5 years) and their families can come out, have a good time and sign up in order to receive a free book every month. Light refreshments will be available for the kids as well. Five storytellers representing each age of the Imagination Library will be at the celebration although the Ashe County program is initially targeting children birth to age two. According to the Dollywood Foundation, the key to developing strong literacy skills is to start at birth. Educators have emphasized the fact that reading with your preschool child is the single most important activity to prepare a child for school. “To immerse a child in a literacy environment can be a stronger predictor of literacy and academic achievement than family income. The more words a child hears, the larger the child’s vocabulary and the more likely the child will be a proficient reader,” a Fact Sheet from the Foundation states. “The entire Imagination Library will be on display so people can see all that is offered and registration will take place that day. This project is coming together all too well and is making a lot of progress. We think this event will be a lot of fun and anyone can attend,” Committee Member Beth Dixon said. Readers for the Kickoff Event include Kathy Chefas, Jeff Dreyer, Stephen Shoemaker, Ginny Tobiassen and Jackie Wolfe. Chefas is a graduate of Northwestern University and was a communications major. She is a local Christmas tree grower and is a member of the Imagination Library Committee. She is secretary of the Friends of the Library and is president of the local PEO. Chefas says she loves children and loves to read so this event is very exciting for her. Dreyer, 45, is the father of two boys and has one grandchild. He has been married to Tammy Vannoy since 2003 and is a production manager at American Emergency Vehicles. Dreyer said he truly enjoys community theater and calls it his passion. He started at about age 10 in a musical pantomime show and added that the bug bit so he started getting involved in everything he could from church plays to high school productions to belonging to three different community theater groups at the same time back in Ohio. He has been involved in the majority of the productions by the Ashe County Little Theatre in some capacity whether on stage or behind the scenes Artist Stephen Shoemaker graduated from Beaver Creek High School and left Ashe County in 1964. He lived in Charlotte for 20 years before moving back to the county. He has been painting full time since 1983 and he has a degree in Art from Appalachian State University. Shoemaker’s works hang in private collections in Japan, Germany, and Russia as well as in the public collections of many of our nation’s influential corporations and galleries. He is well known throughout the area for his paintings of the Virginia Creeper train and his depiction of Ashe County scenes that have captured the nature of life in the mountains. A childhood full of Dr. Seuss gave Ginny Tobiassen a passion for rhymed narrative, which she first exercised by memorizing the rhymed stories already available in books. In 1998 she decided to try a poem of her own, ambitiously choosing Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol as her text. The resulting work, A Christmas Carol in Rhyme, has been well received by audiences around North Carolina. A shorter work, The Gift of the Magi Retold in Rhyme, was completed in 1999. A Christmas Gift for Old Jasper is her first original rhymed story. Tobiassen is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, where she majored in English. Also a graduate of the Denver Publishing Institute, she has worked as an editor in the book publishing industry for more than 20 years. She now works as editorial development chief at McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. Jackie Wolff, a retired educator, came to Ashe County in 2003 from New Bern where she resided for nine years. Her teaching years were spent in Wisconsin, France, Illinois and St. Croix, V.I. where she taught Language Arts, Social Studies, American Literature and Drama. Her training in Instructional Television gave her the opportunity to do PBS’s promotion of Sesame Street in the Chicago area in 1969. Wolff served as a curriculum director, media consultant, staff development specialist and a middle school principal in the Chicago area as well. Her doctorate is in Curriculum from Michigan State University. She spends her winters in Sun City, Arizona. Local sponsors are needed to help with this program from individual sponsors to businesses or organizations sponsoring these efforts. At a cost of $30 a year (including shipping and handling), a child will be able to receive the books mailed to them every month. To enroll a child, to sponsor a child, to become a program sponsor or for more information, call 336-846-9196.