"Independent booksellers are so important," said LeVar Burton, actor, literacy advocate, and host of the PBS series Reading Rainbow, during the opening breakfast keynote at Winter Institute 2026 in Pittsburgh, Pa., Tuesday morning.
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| Janet Webster and LeVar Burton | |
Burton, who is also the American Booksellers Association's Indie Bookstore Ambassador for 2026, was in conversation with Janet Webster Jones, founder and co-owner of Source Booksellers in Detroit, Mich. They discussed some of his major roles as an actor, the power of reading, the importance of representation, and his upcoming memoir.
"What you all do is critical to that which it is I do," Burton continued. "You all hold the space for people like me. You create a safe space for us to come and browse and look around and turn pages. You are warriors on the front lines of the culture wars and I cannot thank you enough for doing what it is you do. Because without the infrastructure that makes up independent booksellers, I wouldn't know what to do with my life. Y'all really do make a difference in this world."
Asked about the power of reading, Burton described reading as the "fulfillment of the promise of humanity." People operate best when all of their senses are engaged, and for Burton, "reading just fires more cylinders than almost any activity that I can think of." And the most important of those cylinders, he said, is the imagination.
Burton recalled his childhood in Sacramento, Calif., where he spent a lot of time on his bed "reading and imagining a world that was safer than the one in which I lived, that was more welcoming than the world in which I lived." He said he's "come to believe that reading is really a passport to who you are and why you're here."
Discussing his role as Kunta Kinte in the 1977 mini-series Roots, Burton said it not only changed his life but gave him a "ringside seat to how it changed America." Prior to Roots appearing on television, people talked about slavery as "an economic engine that was necessary for America to achieve its status on the world stage." Post-Roots, "it was impossible to talk about that institution without considering the human cost." He called Roots creator Alex Haley the "best storyteller I've ever encountered" and "a real storyteller's storyteller."
On the subject of Star Trek: The Next Generation, on which Burton played the character Geordi La Forge, Burton noted that he grew up in a household that watched the original Star Trek series "all the time." He could "hardly express to you the feeling of having grown up with that storytelling and then become a part of that storytelling mythos itself."
He grew up in the 1960s, when there were "very few examples of representation on television." Seeing Nichelle Nichols on the bridge of the Enterprise "meant that when the future came, there was a place for me," and along with seeing Sammy Davis Jr. in The Rifleman or Diahann Carroll in Julia, these were "important, formative images for me." They provided validation and confirmation that "there was a place in this world for me."
"I think the honor of my life is to have been able to portray the Black experience in America from our enslavement to the stars," Burton said. "And when you consider that LeVar, the Reading Rainbow guy, is in the middle of that continuum, I know why I'm here."
Burton, who walked with a cane due to a recent hip replacement surgery, also emphasized the importance of taking care of oneself. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, he recalled, he was living his life "like there was someone chasing me," and he felt he'd been "headed for a heart attack in an airport somewhere." The Covid lockdown gave him the opportunity to "not just slow down but stop," and while examining his priorities, he recognized the changes he needed to make "if I wanted to continue to be of service in this life."
Burton revealed that he has written a memoir called Take My Word for It (coming from Random House in November), explaining that he wrote the memoir because he felt it was important at this point in time to "go on the record about a lot of things." And while he's mostly let his work "speak as loudly for me as it can," he recognized there were "some gaps that my work did not address that I really wanted to discuss in detail." His "deepest desire" with the book is to be "as transparent as I possibly could." Booksellers, ultimately, "will be the judges of that."
In closing, Burton said he considered Alex Haley, Gene Roddenberry, and Fred Rogers to be his "three storyteller mentors," and while out in Pittsburgh before the conference, he was surprised to look up and see a "huge portrait" of Fred Rogers.
"You are in his neighborhood," Burton said. "Act accordingly." --Alex Mutter