Harpeth Middle School seventh-grader Elijah Riggs won the Tristar Reads contest by logging an average of eight hours each day reading.

Last summer Rutherford County teen Taylor Aslup took advantage of every opportunity to read.Aslup balanced work and cheerleading while still finding time to spend more than 31 thousand minutes reading books she frequently downloaded on her phone. That devotion to reading helped her earn a $1,000 scholarship as the overall winner in the annual Tristar Reads contest.

Rutherford County is home to two of the top readers in the state.Smyrna’s Stewart’s Creek High School Senior Taylor Aslup and Murfreesboro’s Oakland Middle School sixth-grader Gibson Weber were among four winners of the annual Tristar Reads contest.

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.”

Jeffrey Stubblefield didn’t spend his summer break like most elementary school children.  Then again, Stubblefield is no ordinary fourth grader.From May 31 to August 8 this summer Stubblefield spent an astonishing 30,150 minutes reading.  That adds up to roughly seven hours a day with a book.

Each summer students from across Tennessee take part in a competition that takes place in chairs, bedrooms, libraries, and even cars.It’s known as Tristar Reads and the goal is to spend the most minutes reading over the summer break. Tennesseans for Student Success created Tristar Reads in 2016 to help stop the so-called “summer slide” that many students encounter over the summer months when they’re not in school.This year, 77 participants students spent roughly 273 thousand minutes reading including overall winner Jeffrey Stubblefield.