At 19 years old, Yohannes Gebregeorgis' received the casual gift of a romance novel titled Love Kitten that changed his life forever. Forced to flee Ethiopia to the Sudan and then to the United States in 1981 as a political refugee, Gebregeorgis put himself through university and a graduate degree in library science and in 1985, took a post at the San Francisco Public Library's Children's Section. There he discovered the wonder of a childhood of literature and determined to bring it to every child in his homeland. In 2002, Gebregeorgis left his job to return to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, with 15,000 donated books. With them, he opened the Shola Children's Library in 2003 followed by The Awassa Reading Center and Ethiopia's first Donkey Mobile Library, servicing the children of remote villages around the rural capital of Awassa.
 
Yohannes was awarded the CNN Hero award in 2008.