Students across Tennessee are encouraged to sign up to compete for a $1,000 scholarship in this year’s Tristar Reads contest.Tennesseans for Student Success (TSS) created the annual summer reading contest in 2016 to help school age children avoid the summer reading slide by spending 20 minutes a day with a book.

Reading champion Tallen Haag’s love of books might actually have its beginnings in her mother’s search for a new house.Stacey Haag says she had one very important prerequisite for any home she considered buying.“We have a whole library in our home. When I bought my house, the requirement was it had to have a library and if it didn’t have a library it had to have a place for a library,” said Stacey Haag.  “We always made sure there were a lot more books than toys and there’s books on every surface of our house and it’s really about leading by example.”