Star Trek's LeVar Burton to Receive Lifetime Achievement Emmy Award
The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences will honor Star Trek: The Next Generation star and Reading Rainbow host LeVar Burton with a lifetime achievement award at this year's 1st Annual Children's & Family Emmy Awards. The event takes place in December. The inaugural Children's & Family Emmy Awards is the first new addition to the Emmy Awards since 1979. The lifetime achievement award recognizes Burton for his years hosting Reading Rainbow on PBS, a television show that helped instill a love of reading and literacy in countless young viewers. His roles as Reading Rainbow's host and executive producer previously earned Burton 12 Daytime Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award.
Burton remains a staunch literacy advocate, appearing recently on The Daily Show to encourage young people to read banned books. He continues to read to audiences today, primarily adults, with his podcast LeVar Burton Reads. Speaking to ComicBook.com in 2019, Burton explained what he hoped to achieve through the podcast, where he reads short fiction by some of his favorite authors.
"If I had a mission statement for LeVar Burton Reads, it would be to remind the Reading Rainbow generation how important reading is in their lives, and their imaginations," Burton says. "I guess more than anything else that's the message that I want. I want people to engage with their imaginations, with these stories. Because, especially as adults now, you guys are adulting. I don't want you to stop using your imaginations because you're going to need them going forward. Because there's a whole lot of shit we're leaving for you to clean up. I'm sorry about that. I apologize, but I am trying to encourage some of the skills and talents you're going to need going forward."
Burton has also launched a book club and a recommendations series via Fable. "Stories have been a central part of my life since I was a child. They have the power to feed our imaginations and explore the very nature of our existence here on earth and beyond. Stories can even bring us closer together as human beings. For me, books are more than words strung together. They are portals into existences of every variety, stripe and hue; the universe and all there is, captured in the pages of good books!" Burton said when announcing the partnership.
Burton is also well known for playing Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next Generation. He'll reprise that role in the upcoming third and final season of Star Trek: Picard on Paramount+.