Before Mychal Threets became the new face of Reading Rainbow—and before he became a librarian or racked up followers on TikTok by spreading library joy—he was a shy kid who loved books. And he was a fan. “I call myself the biggest fan of the show of all time,” he told me. “LeVar Burton’s one of my ultimate heroes. I was very much raised on PBS.”
So when the show came calling, he understood the significance. Reading Rainbow was a childhood touchstone. During its 23-year run, the PBS broadcast won 250 awards, including 26 Emmys, and reached 2 million viewers, promoting literacy by showing kids that reading could actually be fun.
It’s hard to overstate its cultural impact. (Just ask any Millennial the meaning of “butterfly in the sky.”) Some of my earliest memories play to the theme song, and like a lot of former kids, I’ve hoped for a revival.
Years before the reboot was even announced, I stumbled on Threets’s videos. He had a kind, patient way about him that was reminiscent of Burton, Mister Rogers and Bob Ross. And his love of books and the library was infectious. After watching a bunch, I turned to my husband and said, “Someone should ask this guy to host Reading Rainbow.”
Well, someone did. With the first four episodes live, I sat down with Threets—the newly crowned 2026 National Library Week honorary chair—to talk about his life in the library, his upcoming book, the show’s revival and how reading can change lives.
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This interview has been edited for length.
Reader’s Digest: Tell me about the moment you got the email broaching the topic of hosting a Reading Rainbow reboot.
Mychal Threets: Getting asked to be a part of this project was just so amazing. It was a huge surprise for me—something that I didn’t believe but something that I’ve been so thankful for. With those first emails, those first conversations, [it was] true disbelief.
Reader’s Digest: It’s funny because before it was announced, I remember seeing you on TikTok or Instagram and thinking, Oh, my goodness, he has such Reading Rainbow energy.
Mychal Threets: For me, I think, in all honesty, it’s thanks to social media. It’s why they first reached out. It’s how we got put together.
As I made my videos on TikTok and Instagram, so many people would be in the comments like, “Oh, Mychal needs to do something with Reading Rainbow with PBS. It’d be such a fun match. They love libraries. He loves literacy, all the book things.” And I think they spent about a good year and a half, two years, making those comments. And then the Reading Rainbow team reached out, and they asked if I was interested in taking part.
Now we have four episodes that are out in the world, out on YouTube. I’ve been going to conferences, going to libraries, talking to librarians and teachers for the past few months. And so many of them have seen it. So many of them are excited. They’re watching it with their classes. They’re watching it with their kids. Some people who don’t even have kids are watching it for nostalgia’s sake. It’s pretty unbelievable and overwhelming in the best of ways.
Reader’s Digest: You wrote in an Instagram post, “I am a reader, I am a librarian because LeVar Burton and Reading Rainbow so powerfully made us believe we belong in books, we belong everywhere.” How do you see your place in this revival?
Mychal Threets: I like when people use the word revival [for] Reading Rainbow because it kind of helps me not have to feel like I’m trying to fill his shoes—and I’m not at all. We’re doing things quite similarly to the Reading Rainbow of old. It still is kid book reviewers doing some fun things around the book, having some very cool people in each episode. But there’s also some newer things, mainly being that trivia component after each segment.
But for me, I don’t feel like I’m filling his shoes, mainly because it would be way too much pressure to try to do that—one, because he’s a literary giant, but also because he really is one of my main heroes in the entire world. I feel like I’m one of his grown-up Reading Rainbow children. I just happen to have been raised on the show, raised by him and his influence, and now somehow, I’m the next one to try to tell as many kids as possible that reading is supposed to be fun, that they belong in books.
Reader’s Digest: The environment is very different from when Reading Rainbow first aired. Fewer kids are reading now than ever. Books are a hot-button topic. Kids are just distracted—books are competing with an endless stream of videos. Did that affect your approach?
Mychal Threets: Yeah, you know what? It’s such a tricky conversation because I’ve been in libraries for the last 10 years and some change—all the time, anywhere from four to six days per week. And I don’t think that there are fewer kids reading today. I think more and more kids than ever are actually reading. It’s just that there are not as many books for them to read.
Libraries in the last three years have seen a boom. They’ve seen more visits. They’ve seen a lot more people supporting and celebrating them because of, I think, what you’re trying to get at, which is that the book bans and all those sorts of things have made books and libraries controversial.
I think that’s the beauty of kids and readers and a show like Reading Rainbow. Kids have always been very much wired to be curious, to want to discover things, to use their imagination. That’s the beauty of Reading Rainbow with LeVar Burton and now with myself, as they can dive into all these different worlds.
Reader’s Digest: It’s great that Reading Rainbow can be there again to reach kids where they are and prove that reading isn’t schoolwork. It’s fun.
Mychal Threets: I think that’s always been the problem. That’s why people believe there aren’t as many kids in the library, because reading has become a chore. With being in school, you have to read this book at AR (accelerated reader) level, and people are getting discouraged or getting fearful that they’re not caught up with their peers.
But then it comes to shows like Reading Rainbow to say, yes, we of course want you to be reading third-grade books in third grade. We want you to be reading fourth-grade books in fourth grade. But if you want to read No Cats in the Library, if you want to read Nellie’s Purpose in fourth grade, fifth grade, if you’re in second grade, you still should have fun reading. Because I think that’s also the beauty of libraries: You can check out so many books.
As much as we definitely want them to learn to read, I believe the primary focus is showing them that reading is fun.
Reader’s Digest: You also show them that you’re a safe person. At least on social media, you’ve discussed mental health a bit. What made you start sharing?
Mychal Threets: I never made a conscious effort to say, “Today I’m going to make a post about mental health, and I hope it really helps people.” I think just way back when I was doing really, really bad—I’m still having some hard days, but I think when I was very, very close to the edge of not wanting to be alive in the world anymore, before I was ready to admit that, I saw social media as such a help, especially being able to talk about libraries, talk about books, talk about all the things with literature that I loved.
And I think when I first started talking about mental health, I would just be trying to talk to myself. I was trying to hype myself up. I was trying to talk to myself about affirmations, and even just talking to a younger version of myself who desperately needed to be told it’s OK to not be OK.
When I first started doing those posts, making those affirmations, I just saw more and more comments talking about how they felt that way too, how their kids had been struggling in eighth grade and ninth grade.
I was like, you know what? Let me just talk about my own story in a way that is safe for kids and that doesn’t trigger them as much as possible. And to my surprise, they just started to open up to me. Because I think we don’t give kids enough credit that they’re far more in tune with their emotions, with their ability to talk about mental health than we are. I definitely was not like that when I was a kid.
That’s why I love that books have always been friends. I think that’s why I combine books and mental health and libraries. Even though we’ve yet to approach that directly on Reading Rainbow, I think it’s there with every single episode, just by us being on the other side of their screen and being honest and being as happy as possible while letting some vulnerabilities shine through, like the fact that I’m indeed not an actor. I stammer. I stutter. And I think it very much shows that, hey, he’s a real person.
I think every single day that I’m lucky to keep on living and that I’m lucky to have 24 more hours. I’m always going to talk about mental health and just remind people of how much better the world and libraries and books are with their existence in the world.
Reader’s Digest: What kind of kid were you when you were watching Reading Rainbow and getting into reading?
Mychal Threets: I was a very, very shy kid. I was close to painfully shy, even around my family. It was very, very difficult for me to make friends as a kid.
I had an easier time talking to the library staff. I would ask them questions about the book. And for me, being homeschooled from kindergarten through junior year … it was very special to be at the library all the time. That’s why my love for books grew and grew. And talking about not having friends: I was able to make friends in Henry Huggins, in Ramona and Beezus Quimby and Ralph S. Mouse and Super Fudge. Judy Blume, the Great Brain, Junie B. Jones, Amelia Bedelia, Frog and Toad, Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Louis Sachar books—I could go on and name books and characters who became my friends. Richard Scarry, the monster at the end of this book, Alice in Wonderland. I just loved all those stories.
For a quiet person, I talked about books. I would just open up so much. I think just because I was a kid, my imagination just blew up, thanks to books. And I was able to feel so special, feel the magic of the pages of literature.
Deep down, even though I never made a conscious decision—it wasn’t like I woke up one day in 2013 and said, “I think the library might be a good career.” It was that lifelong love for books and the library, of always having felt safe knowing it was a place I could always return to that eventually, [when] I was trying to figure out my life, I went to the library and I asked, “How do you become a librarian?”
That was my whole career, from November 2013 to March 2024. It was just learning more and more about library joy and book joy each day. And I think it grew each and every day because the little version of me that needed a lot of help and struggled so bad but found a friend in the library, in books, was starting to also find library joy along the way.
Reader’s Digest: You’re now approaching reading from an entirely different direction—you have a book coming out on Feb. 3, 2026. Tell me about it.
Mychal Threets: The book is called I’m So Happy You’re Here: A Celebration of Library Joy. It’s illustrated by Lorraine Nam. I’m now one of the biggest fans in the world of Lorraine Nam. Her illustrations match my words better than I could ever have dreamed of. I can’t wait for people to see them. She just perfectly captured all the library joy and belonging that I tried to get at in the book.
[In it], there are a bunch of kids coming into the library, and it’s just me as a character and another librarian trying to convince them that they belong in the library, showing them everything. We tried to make as much representation as possible: There’s a kid who’s blind, reading books in Braille. There are kids in wheelchairs, service animals. There’s even a library kid who represents unhoused kids, which is very important to me, having been a public librarian, just seen how many times you never know what a kid is going through just by the outward appearance.
I feel like every time a storytime reads a book—or a teacher or a family together, or just a singular person—they’re going to find something new, even seeing my tattoos on my arm in the book, my big, giant afro with a head with a headband on.
Reader’s Digest: It’s like you’ve come full circle.
Mychal Threets: I’m just so proud of the book. It’s so special. I was lucky enough to grow up with six grandparents, with both of my parents’ parents and also my mom’s grandparents. And right before about a year or so ago, my dad’s mom passed away. Even though the picture book wasn’t fully ready to go, I was able to show my Grammy the picture book. She was just so proud.
So it meant the entire world to me that she got to see it as much as possible before she passed away. A person who wasn’t always able to use libraries or learn to read got to read her grandson’s stories.
Reader’s Digest: Do you have another book in the works?
Mychal Threets: We’re working on three early reader books with Simon & Schuster. They’ll hopefully be coming out after the picture book, not too long after. Those are pretty much like retellings of my library kids’ stories. So for me, [I’m] very much dedicating those books to the library kids because it’s their stories, and I just get to write them in a forum to help them learn to read and have fun at the exact same time.
And then Penguin Random House and I just agreed on one more picture book that will come out after those four books.
Reader’s Digest: Before we wrap, I have to know: What’s next for Reading Rainbow?
Mychal Threets: We’re kind of just living in this … not limbo but in the aftermath of those four episodes. I think both the team and I knew that people would be excited, but we had no idea how excited they would be. So we’re kind of on cloud nine.
A couple of the episodes are nearing 1 million views each. I think they’re all over 600,000 views. So we’re moving forward. We’re hopeful. We’re brainstorming, we’re considering other books and just hoping for more. Nothing fully, fully official, but I think we’d be silly not to want to keep it going. That’s me, at least.
I’ve been telling people: I mean, it’s only ever been myself and LeVar Burton as the host of this program. And for me, just to ever be in line with his legacy—I’m nowhere near, but I was raised by him, raised by Mister Rogers. To have my name, my likeness alongside it … it’s just such a such a beautiful, fun thing.
You can check out new episodes of Reading Rainbow on YouTube and preorder Threets’s book, I’m So Happy You’re Here: A Celebration of Library Joy, from any online bookstore.
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Sources:
- Mychal Threets on TikTok
- Mychal Threets on Instagram
- American Library Association: “Award-winning librarian and ‘Reading Rainbow’ host Mychal Threets to serve as 2026 National Library Week honorary chair”
The post <i>Reading Rainbow</i> Host Mychal Threets Is Sparking Joy, One Story at a Time appeared first on Reader's Digest.
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