Adult Programs

What would you do if you suffered a sudden, severe, and highly publicized fall from grace? Would you run? Seek out a quiet life of anonymity and seclusion? Or would you find a way to redeem yourself? Mr. Jimmy from Around the Way is a mesmerizing look at one man’s fall from grace and the age-old struggle for redemption. Meet the author, Jeffrey Blount, at our next Lit Chat Interview, live at the Pablo Creek Regional Library.

The 2024 Jax Stacks Reading Challenge starts January 1 and runs through December 31, 2024. Library staff has hand-picked 16 categories of books for you to read this year to broaden your reading horizons. Try a new series, a new genre, and a new format, and check out some books you might have overlooked!

How do you best serve your creative processes? Where do you go for inspiration? How important is a writing community? And how can you carve out a life in this business of art? New York Times bestselling author Jami Attenberg will share ideas and perspectives for putting your creativity first at our next Writer's Lab workshop. Later that same day, she'll return for a Lit Chat Interview where she'll be in conversation with local author and interviewer, Nikesha Elise Wiliams.

The New York Times bestselling author of the 2022 memoir, I Came All This Way To Meet You, is coming all the way from New Orleans to meet you, her readers and fellow writers, at Jacksonville Public Library for two back-to-back bookish events! First up: Aspiring writers will learn how to best serve their own creative processes, find inspiration, and carve out a life in the business of art in a hands-on Writer's Lab workshop. Then, after lunch, Jami Attenberg returns for a Lit Chat interviewer and local author Nikesha Elise Williams.

The new year brings with it new releases, new challenges, fresh starts, and an all-new Library Book Club! Novel Pursuits meets on the third Saturday of the month at San Marco Branch Library. Where will our fiction collection take you? You'll have to join the club to find out! Book clubs are also one of the best ways to find out what other people are reading (and what they think about the books everyone else is reading). What do you say? Join us at your favorite library and let's talk books!

The Red Hill Cemetery Project documents an African American Cemetery in Waycross Georgia with more than 1000 burials dating from the late nineteen century. Researchers from UNF and the Okefenokee Heritage Center are documenting the site, digitizing death certificates, collecting oral histories, and scanning additional documents (photographs, funeral home records, etc). The project is multi-disciplinary and includes contributors from Archaeology, History, and Geography. UNF professors David Sheffler, Felicia Bevel, and Michael Boyles will speak about the project and its importance to local history.

The holiday season is here! With all the parties and get-togethers, it can be a busy time. Plus, there's all that shopping, cooking and decorating! You should definitely reward yourself for all of that hard work by taking the time to read a good book! If you're looking for ideas about what to read or looking for the perfect gift for the book lovers in your life, join us at Library Book Club! 

Nat Glover was born in 1943, in segregated Jacksonville, Florida. At seventeen, he unknowingly headed into an angry white mob and the Ku Klux Klan attacking young black protestors staging a sit-in at a downtown whites-only lunch counter. Known as “Ax Handle Saturday,” this harrowing encounter with racism would commit him to a lifetime of fighting for justice. He joined the Jacksonville Police Department in 1966 where he was promoted to detective, rose to sergeant, and was appointed the city’s first hostage negotiator. In 1995, Duval County voters elected him the first Black sheriff in Florida since Reconstruction. Hear more about his incredible work and his new memoir, Striving for Justice: A Black Sheriff.

Released in 1926, The Flying Ace was a classic silent film that featured an all-African-American cast, with principal photography shot right here in Jacksonville. Made in the South during a period that arguably represented the height of "Jim Crow," it was one of many films by white filmmaker Richard E. Norman that challenged the stereotypes about Black people found in the overwhelming majority of the films of that era. In 2021, The Flying Ace was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

If you plan to come out of National Novel Writing Month with a ready-to-publish manuscript (or you just want to plan your next steps), join us at Writer's Lab in December for a hands-on how-to session with Mike Messier. He will instruct you, step-by-step, on how to write and publish fiction and nonfiction on Kindle Vella & Amazon KDP. If you bring your finished manuscript, you could even leave with a published book!