FORMER INMATE TURNED LITERACY HERO - 'I'm Teaching Myself to Read on TikTok'

BY BOLDLY ADMITTING PUBLICLY HE COULDN'T READ, OLIVER JAMES HAS SPARKED A VIRAL CONVERSATION ABOUT LEARNING-AND IS HELPING THOUSANDS TURN THEIR LIVES AROUND RIGHT ALONG WITH HIM

- JOHNNY DODD and LIZZIE HYMAN

Standing onstage in October at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., looking out at hundreds of people in the audience, Oliver James wanted to pinch himself. Instead the 35-year-old motivational speaker, who was being honored by the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy, took a deep breath before he began reading from a teleprompter. “I was nervous,” Oliver recalls, “but knowing that I was about to do something in front of all those people that I wasn’t very good at was an exciting type of nervousness that I’ll never forget.”

Just a year ago James would have been hardpressed to read a restaurant menu, let alone a teleprompter. All that changed in October 2022, when he kicked off a post on his TikTok page (@oliverspeaks1) with a simple but brutally honest confession: “What’s up? I can’t read.” Overnight James—who had spent his early 20s in prison for dealing firearms—became a bona fide viral sensation as he began posting videos of himself sitting in his van while painstakingly working his way word by word through one book after another.