Each March, something magical blooms on the banks of the Cane River in downtown Natchitoches. A village of colorful tents sprouts from the ground with children’s books piled on tables. Members of local organizations staff the tents armed with a story and a related art project, science experiment, or other activity designed to spark a love of reading. Children and their parents bounce from station to station, and at the end of the day, every child leaves with at least one free new or used book, while caregivers come away with strategies or resources to help them continue nurturing their child’s reading education.  

This is Reading on the River, an annual day-long festival hosted by the Service League of Natchitoches in Natchitoches Parish. If you’re in neighboring Winn Parish, you might know it as Once Upon a Time in Winnfield. Or Once Upon a Time in the Park if you’re in Hammond in Tangipahoa Parish. Or Tales on the Trail if you’re in Jena, or Tales on Candy Cane Lane if you’re in northern LaSalle Parish during the holidays. But no matter which family literacy festival you’re at in these four parishes, there’s one person to thank for their existence: Dr. Debra Jo Hailey, an associate professor of child and family studies at Northwestern State University. 

Hailey’s journey to launching the first of these family literacy festivals began when she was a preschool teacher and faculty supervisor at the Northwestern State University Head Start Center. Part of the Head Start framework focuses on involving the family in the child’s development, but Hailey began to notice systemic challenges that made executing the framework difficult. For example, low-income parents could be reluctant to apply for library cards because of a requirement to provide a home address, which might feel impossible or unsafe because of housing instability, fear of surveillance, and bureaucratic requirements for access to social services. For similar reasons, it could be difficult to get family members to come to school for parent-teacher conferences. 

Hailey started thinking of possible solutions while taking two graduate courses—one in literacy and one on the role of creativity in gifted and talent education. 

“Those two things kind of coalesced in my brain,” said Hailey. “How can I be creative and do something with literacy outside of the school so that I could incentivize parents who may not have a great relationship with the school?” 

An idea for an event began to take shape. Hailey knew from the start that it needed two things: to be free and to be held in a neutral space. That meant no churches, which might only attract members of that church, and no schools, which might only attract students of that school, and no boys and girls clubs that catered to low-income children. 

“Because why should this be for only low income?” said Hailey. “It should be for everybody.” 

Hailey then enlisted fellow educators and other members of the community who were interested in bringing the event to life. In 2009, with zero budget and a small army of volunteers, the first Reading on the River was born. 

A few years later, Hailey moved to Hammond to teach early childhood education at Southeastern Louisiana University. The community there heard about what she had created in Natchitoches with Reading on the River and wanted to replicate the event. This led to Tangipahoa Parish’s Once Upon a Time in the Park. Then Hailey’s niece, a graduate of Northwestern, asked for her support launching Tales on the Trail in Jena. In 2024, Hailey brought the event to Winn Parish with Once Upon a Time in Winnfield. 

The secret to sustainably expanding her festival framework across the state lies in gradually releasing responsibility of the events to other members of the community. Today, Reading on the River continues under the stewardship of the Service League of Natchitoches, while Ready Start Tangipahoa, an early childhood education program, organizes Once Upon a Time in the Park. Hailey, who now lives in LaSalle Parish, is currently involved with Tales on the Trail, Tales on Candy Cane Lane, and Once Upon a Time in Winnfield. On top of this, she teaches the next generation of educators at Northwestern; she’s involved with Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, providing books to children in Natchitoches, Winn, and LaSalle parishes; and she travels to conferences across the country, presenting on early literacy, including what she has learned about producing family literacy festivals.  

For these numerous contributions to the state’s literacy landscape, the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities is pleased to honor Dr. Debra Jo Hailey with the 2026 Light Up for Literacy award, presented in partnership with the State Library of Louisiana’s Center for the Book.  

Morgan Randall is a writer based in New Orleans. She is the communications manager for the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, oversees the State of the Coast conference, and studies fiction in the University of New Orleans’s Creative Writing MFA program.