Forty Years of Reading Aloud: Literacy Partners Raises $1.3 Million at Pier Sixty
The organization’s 2026 Evening of Readings & Gala Dinner marked four decades since Liz Smith founded it in 1986, honoring Patricia Cornwell, Sabastian Niles, Barbara Tober and Sherrie Westin.
The most persuasive speaker of the evening was not a novelist or an executive. She was a Literacy Partners student, and she stood before New York’s literary and philanthropic establishment at Pier Sixty to describe learning English through the organization’s programs, then turning around to help other students do the same. She is now pursuing a career in healthcare. Her children are doing well in school. In a room accustomed to hearing about outcomes in the aggregate, she offered the specific version.
The occasion was the 2026 Evening of Readings & Gala Dinner, hosted by award-winning journalist Lesley Stahl at Chelsea Piers, and it carried a double significance. The black-tie gathering raised $1.3 million for Literacy Partners while marking the fortieth anniversary of a gala first held in 1986 by the organization’s founder, Liz Smith. Forty years on, the guest list still draws from the same intersecting worlds Smith moved through: literary, philanthropic, civic and business New York, gathered around the proposition that reading is the foundation everything else rests on.
The organization’s method explains why that student’s story functions as a mission statement rather than an anecdote. Literacy Partners advances literacy two generations at a time, working with adults, parents and caregivers so that the skills they build travel directly to the children in their care. It is a deliberately patient approach, one that treats a household rather than an individual as the unit of change.
Four honorees were recognized for work that reflects that commitment from different directions. Patricia Cornwell received the Lifetime Achievement Award, acknowledging a body of internationally acclaimed crime fiction that has helped shape the modern contours of the genre. Sabastian Niles, President and Chief Legal Officer of Salesforce, accepted the Distinguished Leadership in Literacy Award for leadership grounded in access, equity and opportunity.
Barbara Tober received the Lizzie Award, named for Liz Smith and given for sustained commitment to culture, philanthropy and civic engagement. A patron of the arts, publishing leader and lifelong New Yorker, Tober spent more than thirty years as Editor-in-Chief of BRIDES magazine, which gave the award a particular resonance on the night the gala she was being honored at turned forty. Sherrie Westin, President and CEO of Sesame Workshop, took the Champion of Literacy Award for her work leading the global nonprofit behind Sesame Street, an organization that has spent decades proving that early literacy can be delivered at scale.
Asaf Bar-Tura, CEO of Literacy Partners, framed the evening in terms of what it makes possible rather than what it commemorated. “This gathering, which celebrated remarkable literacy champions, demonstrated that when we come together, a better future is possible,” he said. “Literacy is a gateway to social mobility and economic opportunity. The Literacy Partners community will continue to insist on a nation where everyone has the opportunity to read, work, engage, and thrive.”
The room reflected that range of constituencies. Among those in attendance were Stahl, Cornwell, Niles, Tober, Westin and Bar-Tura, along with David Westin, Jean Shafiroff, Sheila Nevins, Perri Peltz, Courtney E.K. Lewis and Bill Buford, a cross-section of the cultural, business and philanthropic communities that have sustained the organization across four decades.
What the money funds is research-based programming that combines literacy instruction with child development and parenting support, strengthening children’s early reading, social-emotional growth and school readiness through the adults closest to them. The stated aims are ambitious and unsentimental: to break cycles of poverty, improve employment prospects, and close the achievement gap before children reach a classroom.
Which returns the evening to where it began. The student who spoke at Pier Sixty was describing precisely that sequence, compressed into a single family and a handful of years. Forty galas have been held in service of making her account ordinary rather than remarkable. The $1.3 million raised at this one buys another stretch of that work.
For more information, please visit www.literacypartners.org.
