Mychal Threets Tells HGSE Graduates Their Stories Matter

Mychal Threets, a literacy advocate and newest host of Reading Rainbow, urged Harvard Graduate School of Education’s graduates to recognize their own power as educators, telling them their stories, and the ones they help tell, matter.

Threets, who grew up in California’s Solano County Library system and later worked there as a librarian, told graduates he carries at least 14 library cards in his wallet.

Two, he said, are especially meaningful to him, he said. One belonged to his late grandmother, who he said denied library access as a child in Arkansas before later learning to read in California, and another to Ana Grace Marquez Green, one of the 26 victims killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

“You are the keeper of your own stories,” Threets said. “You are difference makers, you’re change makers, and that starts right now in this very moment.”

HGSE Dean Nonie K. Lesaux by praising libraries as essential “third spaces.”

At the close of the event, Lesaux announced that HGSE graduates of Threets’ book into Harvard Yard for Commencement and appointed him to a new honorary role at HGSE’s “librarian in residence.”