As a college freshman, Malcolm Mitchell struggled with reading. Now the NFL veteran is a children’s book author and literacy activist.
As a child growing up in a “poverty pocket” of southern Georgia, former NFL wide receiver Malcolm Mitchell says reading was never a priority. The best way up and out, he believed, was to become an athlete or an entertainer, and neither job demanded bookishness.
Mr. Mitchell would go on to help the New England Patriots win the Super Bowl in 2017. But when he arrived at the University of Georgia on a football scholarship, he started to feel self-conscious about reading at an 8th-grade level. He recalls an occasion when an English professor called on students to read aloud from Edgar Allan Poe. “My heart started racing,” he says. “I was terrified I was going to embarrass myself in front of everyone.
It wasn’t the first time that Mr. Mitchell’s poor reading skills had gotten in the way. He often had to pause kung fu movies to stumble through the subtitles. At a grocery store near campus, he mistakenly bought apple sauce instead of apple slices because he read the label wrong. But at 19, it was his envy of the intellectual confidence of his peers that ultimately pushed him to hit the books. “I was fearless on the football field,” he explains. “I didn’t want to be afraid of the classroom.
Today Mr. Mitchell, 28, is a writer himself. His second children’s book, “My Very Favorite Book in the Whole Wide World,” will be published next month in a bilingual edition with English and Spanish side by side. Retired from the NFL because of injuries, he devotes himself to traveling the country to promote literacy, particularly among students from disadvantaged backgrounds like his own. “Children listen to me because I look like many of them,” he says.
“If I could have convinced all of my friends as a child to read, they would have made better choices,” Mr. Mitchell says over Zoom from his home in Atlanta, which he shares with his partner, Jasmine Erves, and their 1-year-old son. Statistics from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a child-welfare charity, show that students who struggle to read by the end of third grade are four times more likely to drop out of high school than proficient readers.
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