The Friends of South Carolina Libraries will host their Annual Conference on Saturday, April 29, 2023 at the Aiken County Library. The one-day conference will feature poet Len Lawson as the keynote speaker. SC Humanities supported this program with a Mini Grant.
Friends of South Carolina Libraries is a statewide organization that was created in the late 1980’s to help foster, create, and support local Friends of the Library groups, and to provide networking opportunities for these groups to work together for the support of library services throughout the State of South Carolina. Their annual conference is an opportunity for library Friends, Board members, staff, trustees, and interested members of the general public to receive training designed to assist in their mission to support libraries in South Carolina.
The 2023 annual conference will take place from 10:00 a.m. – 5:30 p.m. at the Aiken County Library (314 Chesterfield Street S, Aiken, SC 29801). It will include an update from the SC State Library, presentations on Board recruitment and community outreach, an open forum on membership, a presentation of their annual awards, a documentary screening, and a presentation by poet Len Lawson from 1:30 – 2:15 p.m.
Len Lawson is the author of Chime (Get Fresh Books, 2019) and the chapbook Before the Night Wakes You (Finishing Line Press, 2017). He is also editor of Hand in Hand: Poets Respond to Race (Muddy Ford Press, 2017) and The Future of Black: Afrofuturism and Black Comics Poetry (Blair Press, 2021). Among his accolades, he won the 2016 Jasper Project Artist of the Year Award in Literary Arts, the inaugural 2018 NC Poetry Society Susan Laughter Meyers Fellowship in Poetry, and the 2020 SC Academy of Authors Carrie McCrary Nickens Fellowship in Poetry. He has received other fellowships from Tin House, Palm Beach Poetry Festival, Callaloo, Vermont Studio Center, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts among others. Currently, he serves on the Boards of Directors for The Jasper Project. Len earned a PhD in English Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and currently is Assistant Professor of English at Newberry College.