Augusta State University Receives $20,000 Grant From Watson-Brown Foundation

Augusta, Ga. - Augusta State University has been awarded a $20,000 grant from the Watson-Brown Foundation to complete an audiobook library of classic Southern literature.

“The grant will allow ASU to complete the English program’s Schools Project and distribute 1000 copies of the ten-disc library to universities, colleges, public schools, and libraries throughout the Southeast, ” says Walter Evans, ASU professor of English and project director. The Schools Project, which is a project of ASU’s Department of English and Foreign Languages, allows middle and high school students who may struggle with reading skills to read in private with the prompting of CDs.

According to Dr. Evans, funding for individual reading coaches or tutors at the middle school and high school levels is rare, and audiobooks, like those in the Watson-Brown/Augusta State University Audiobook Library of Classic Southern Literature, are invaluable in improving literacy.

The texts will be recorded and copied on CDs as MP3 files and made available to schools or library media centers. Students will then be able to copy the files to MP3 players, iPhones, or computers. This will allow library CDs to remain accessible to each and every student in the library or media center.

“Within a year, we hope to have all these texts available on the university’s and regional libraries’ websites. ASU’s policy of allowing students to make non-commercial copies of the audiobook CDs means the one thousand library copies funded through the grant will be endlessly replicated and made available to untold thousands of students for years to come,” says Dr. Evans.

A few Southern literary works read by local native Southerners have already been recorded in the Schools Project. Works by Edgar Allen Poe, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative, Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories, frontier humor by Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, George Washington Harris, and their contemporaries are among the texts that will be added to the audio library.