Beckley, WV – Beckley Rotary Club will host local author S. D. “Sam” Smith on May 2, 2023 at the Historic Black Knight at noon.
Best known for The Green Ember Series, Smith’s million-selling adventure saga features heroic #RabbitsWithSwords.
The Green Ember spent time as the number one bestselling audiobook in the world on Audible.
His newest novel, co-authored with his sixteen-year-old son, is a thrilling fantasy called Jack Zulu and the Waylander’s Key.
Smith’s stories are captivating readers across the globe who are hungry for “new stories with an old soul.”
Smith is a founder and owner of Story Warren, a publishing, events, and IP development house based in rural West Virginia. Story Warren exists to serve families as “allies in imagination.”
S. D. Smith lives in Grandview, West Virginia with his wife and four kids.
AND Rotary will present $6,000 donation to Marshall University’s
June Harless Center for Imagination Library
Beckley Rotary Club’s “For the Love of Reading” community service project sought to bring Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library to every baby born at Raleigh General Hospital.
With tremendous District Rotary and local club support, partnership with Delta Kappa Gamma, and Beckley Appalachian Regional Healthcare’s generous donation, over 300 books and $6,658 in enrollment funds were raised.
Delta Kappa Gamma supports the efforts of Imagination Library enrollment throughout the area.
Representatives from Marshall University’s June Harless Center for Imagination Library, which oversees the statewide programming for West Virginia will be present to receive the club’s monetary donation.
According to Beckley Rotary Club President April Elkins-Badtke, the service project’s goal was to partner with the Labor and Delivery Department at Raleigh General Hospital.
“We wanted to create a congratulatory gift for babies born in the hospital that includes a note of congratulations and an enrollment form for Imagination Library,” said Elkins-Badtke.
Books and enrollment forms were delivered to the labor and delivery unit last month.
“It has been such a rewarding experience for this club and our partners to serve our communities in this important way. We know from the Department of Education that ‘17 percent of West Virginia adults have significant difficulty with literacy tasks related to everyday life and work, while an additional 32 percent face some degree of difficulty with certain literacy skills.’ Bringing Imagination Library to every child born at Raleigh General can have a significant and positive impact on improving literacy in our state,” added Elkins-Badtke.
In March alone, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, which includes over 2,700 local program partners, gifted over 2,307,266 books. The total number of free books gifted as of March 2023, is 204,274,622!
