Literacy Volunteers is pleased to announce that nationally known local authors Mary Jane Ryals, Pamela Ball, and Robert Olen Butler are the selected readers for this year’s Floridiana panel to be held at The Junction@South Monroe on Thursday, August 22, 2019.

Tickets are $25 cash/check or $27 credit, available at the Literacy office in the LeRoy Collins Main library (3^rd floor), at the door the night of the event, or available online at the Literacy website: www.literacyvolunteersleon.org/events

The readers:

Mary Jane Ryals has lived near the northern Gulf coast of Florida most of her life, where she taught writing at Tallahassee Community College and Florida State University. She has also worked as a waitress and bartender, office manager, pharmacy tech, features writer/editor, typesetter, yoga teacher – and a mother.
She is Poet Laureate of the Big Bend of Florida, and she won a Florida Book Award for her novel Cookie & Me (2010). Her most recent book is Cutting Loose in Paradise (Pineapple Press,2015).

Pamela Ball is haole, born and raised on Oahu of American parents. The author of Lava, and The Floating City, she has won numerous writing awards, including the Hemingway Short Fiction Award. She and her family live in Tallahassee, Florida.

Robert Olen Butler is the Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing at Florida State University. He has published seventeen novels and six volumes of short fiction, one of which, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. When not traveling to lecture, read, collaborate, or muse, he lives, and writes, in Florida, with his wife, the poet Kelly Lee Butler.

This event supports Literacy Volunteers of Leon County, which provides free literacy, language, and job skills development services. Other outreach programming includes Family literacy workshops and events.  This year, Literacy Volunteers provided ongoing tutoring services to over 250 clients and provided work and job skill help to more than 150 community members. To find out how you can support or become involved in their programs as a volunteer or through your financial donation, please visit their website, stop by their office on the third floor of the LeRoy Collins public library, or call 850 606 2644.