Blog
Southport Book Festival: How a Story Becomes a Book
Many of us have stories in our heads that never make it onto the printed page. Those who do complete this mysterious process – including Jeff Siebold, Jean Heller, John Graves, and Teri Brown, the “Authors We Adore by the Sea” – shared their methods at FOLSOI’s recent...
FOLSOI Book Festival: Celebrating Another Great Year
This year’s FOLSOI Annual Meeting and Southport Book Festival: “Authors We Adore by the Shore,” was a success in anyone’s book! We filled the Southport Community Center with attendees intrigued to hear from award-winning local authors Teri M. Brown, John Graves, Jean...
FOLSOI’s September 2022 Newsletter
Bienvenido to our September Newsletter! It's time to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month, which runs from September 15 - October 15. ¡Colorín colorado!, a bi-lingual site for educators and families of English learners, offers a fantastic collection of resources to help...
Experiencing a ‘Sense of Place’ in Meeting the Author
Greensboro, North Carolina, author Tim Swink addressed a capacity crowd at Barbee Library on Oak Island this week to talk about his life, books and craft. Introduced by FOLSOI’s Programs Co-Chair, Patty Langer, Tim described his background working first for newspapers...
What Would YOU Risk to Protect Banned Books?
For Banned Books Week (Sept. 18-24), I want to share the experiences of my mother and her parents who lived in Berlin as the Nazis came to power. The quotations below from my mother shine a light on the intellectual darkness that soon enveloped Germany. “On the night...
Pirates in the Room, Pirates over Zoom
The Barbee Library Max and Sarah Williams Life Long Learners have once again made history with the launch of hybrid presentation capabilities offering concurrent “in-library” and “via Zoom” participation options. This week,...
International Literacy Day, September 8th
As Friends of the Library, we all share a love of reading. But did you know that there are approximately 771 million people worldwide who lack basic literacy skills? In the United States, a shocking 1 in 5 adults have low literacy skills, while in NC 26% of adults...
The Real History of Pirates
Today’s session of the Barbee Library Max and Sarah Williams Life Long Learners (LLL) series examined the history of pirates and the reasons why pirates capture our imaginations. Unbeknownst to your Roving Reporter, several of the Zoom series participants sported...
Board Member Profile – Meet Gail Sawchuk FOLSOI Membership Chairperson
It felt like the perfect match. Gail Sawchuk moved to Southport in 2018 and had been looking for a way to volunteer since the day she arrived. She transplanted from Colorado with her husband Pete and two sons and a ton of business and technical skills that she could...
Summer Reading and So Much More!
Thanks to a generous Civic and Community Programs grant from BEMC, Barbee Library on Oak Island and Harper Library in Southport offered an array of entertaining and educational summer reading programs throughout June and July. Beyond providing books and tracking...
Want to Learn to Play Chess? Come to the Library!
The room buzzed with enthusiasm before the program even started as participants of all ages came to Harper Library for Jeff Mount’s beginner chess class. I was one of them, representing the oldest student who had never before played chess. Truthfully, I was a bit...
Meet the Authors: Three Authors Share Their “10 Little Rules”
An afternoon of reflection and inspiration was the genre of the latest Meet the Author program at Harper Library on Friday, June 24th. Three amazing female authors, each of whom penned a book in the “10 Little Rules” motivational series, read excerpts from their books...
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