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At the 2026 Book Harvest Summer Block Party, 15,363 books were harvested in just 3 hours. That’s 85 books harvested per minute by 3,500+ attendees – a 56.4% increase in books harvested from last year! And it all happened right at Durham Central Park, amidst music, games, food, and joyful community.

At Book Harvest, our culture has always been built on something simple but powerful: people who show up fully, again and again, for our families and for each other. Few people embody that spirit more than Tabitha Blackwell.

Book Harvest’s 6th annual Summer Block Party is a free community-wide event celebrating summer and books. The afternoon will include family activities and entertainment, highlighted by an abundance of free children’s books for every child—from infants to high schoolers—to take home and keep forever (there will be 15,000 books to choose from this year!)

On June 22nd, the Durham Board of County Commissioners proclaimed July 6th-10th Summer Learning Week in Durham County! See the official Proclamation below. We are so grateful to the entire Board of County Commissioners for lifting up the importance of summer learning in this way, and to our partners across the county who have made this possible.

Heading into our country's 250th anniversary, I find myself impatient. We are capable of delivering so much more than symbols and splashy events: we are capable of making a bold, ambitious commitment to the future of our democracy.

By the time a North Carolina toddler turns 2, there’s a 40% chance they already have their own tablet. A 2025 report from Common Sense Media found that screen time at home for young children now averages about two and a half hours a day, and a growing share of it is spent on short-form video — TikTok, YouTube Shorts, the kind of clips built to be watched once and swiped past. It’s a snapshot of what childhood looks like right now, nationally.

We’re only 23 days away from the best event of the summer – Book Harvest’s annual Summer Block Party!

This week, thanks to the generous sponsorship of Replacements, Ltd., I attended my first Books on Break program at Rankin Elementary School in Guilford County, and I've been thinking about it ever since.

Reading Outside the Lines: Book Harvest's StoryWalk at Heritage, A Gathering Place What if a walk through the woods could also be a story? That's exactly what visitors to Heritage, A Gathering Place in Roxboro will find when they head out on the new trail behind the building. Thanks to a partnership between Book Harvest and the JES Avanti Foundation, a StoryWalk now winds along a 0.25 mile stretch of wooded trail behind Heritage, inviting families to read together as they mov