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Congratulations to the recipient of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities’ 2025 Light Up for Literacy Award: Prime Time’s own Lt. Michael Brooks.

Brooks’ Prime Time story began in 2017, when he had the big idea of creating a community center that would provide a safe haven for children and their families living in a high-crime area in Ascension Parish. Two years later, Brooks brought Prime Time to the Hickley M. Waguespack Center and Study Commons (or “The Wag Center,” as it’s lovingly called), where he has consistently implemented some of Prime Time’s most successful and robustly attended programs in the state. He has also transformed the community. His relentless focus on education, community engagement, and relationship building has resulted not just in wildly popular Prime Time programs but in the integration of a study commons, a Little Free Library, and other literacy and learning supports that have had a tangible impact on the region. Crime has dropped since the Wag Center took root, and another center built on its success is in the works in neighboring Iberville Parish. 

Brooks received the award at the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities’ Bright Lights Awards Dinner on April 23 in Baton Rouge, where he also closed out the night in enthusiastic Prime Time fashion with his reading of Abiyoyo.

Celebrating its 40th anniversary, the Bright Lights Awards—formerly called the Humanities Awards and given by the LEH, Prime Time’s parent organization—offer a collective opportunity to celebrate all the humanities have to offer and honor documentary filmmakers and photographers, literacy and language advocates, historians and authors, culture advocates, and more.