logo
Children's Book Festival returns to Shreve Memorial Library

Children's Book Festival returns to Shreve Memorial Library

Yahoo23-04-2025
SHREVEPORT, LA (KTAL/KMSS) – The Shreve Memorial Library Children's Book Festival returns Saturday, May 3, at LSU Shreveport.
The annual event, presented in memory of John Tuggle, is a family-friendly, daylong literary celebration featuring children's book authors and illustrators, entertainment, costumed characters, games, and activities for children of all ages.
The festival is scheduled to take place on Saturday, May 3, from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. on the grounds of Louisiana State University Shreveport (LSUS). Admission to the festival is free and open to the public.
Dork Diaries author and illustrator, Rachel Renée Russell and Nikki Russell, will headline the festival, along with children's book authors and illustrators Greg Foley, Alicia Salazar, and Charlotte Gunnufson.
BPCC to use scenic projection to immerse audiences for upcoming spring production
According to a release, patrons of Shreve Memorial Library can get to know the works of these featured authors at special story time programs, taking place now through May 2nd at Shreve Memorial Library branches.
During the festival, attendees will be able to meet and interact with these authors throughout the day in author tents, purchase copies of their works and have them autographed, and see each author bring their works to life during special presentations.
Additionally, children will have a chance to meet some of their favorite storybook characters, such as Elephant and Piggie, Pete the Cat, Bad Kitty, Zoom Squirrel, Ladybug Girl, Curious George, Little Critter, Spot the Dog, Madeline, Winnie the Pooh, and more, at the festival. Children will be able to have their pictures taken with these and other popular characters.
Community organizations and local businesses will join Shreve Memorial Library to present Literacy Lane, an interactive area of the festival that celebrates childhood literacy. Literacy Lane is a special area of the Children's Book Festival where community partners come together to promote a love of reading and lifelong learning in fun, interactive ways. At Literacy Lane, children can play games to improve literacy skills while learning about the valuable services offered by these organizations. All activities taking place in Literacy Lane are free of charge.
LSUS Auxiliary Services will provide concessions for the festival. Attendees can purchase items such as hamburgers, chicken wraps, pizza and hot dogs from the Port Grille, located inside of the LSUS University Center.
A schedule of events for the Shreve Memorial Library Children's Book Festival is below:
Shreve Memorial Library Children's Book Festival 2025 Event Schedule
10:00 a.m. Festival Opens
11:15 a.m. – 12:10 p.m. Author Presentation – Charlotte Gunnufson, Hard Hat Hank and the Sky-High
Solution, Dream Submarine
12:15 p.m. – 1:10 p.m. Author Presentation – Alicia Salazar, Camila the Star series
1:15 p.m. – 2:10 p.m. Author Presentation – Greg Foley, Dex Dingo World's Best Greatest Ever
Inventor
2:15 p.m. – 3:15 p.m. Author Presentation – Rachel Renée Russell & Nikki Russell, Dork Diaries, The
Misadventures of Max Crumbly
4:00 p.m. Festival Closes
For more information, festival updates, and complete list of story time programs, please visit Shreve Memorial Library.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Ella Berman's ‘L.A. Women' is a breezy retro novel with bite — and lots of familiar characters
Ella Berman's ‘L.A. Women' is a breezy retro novel with bite — and lots of familiar characters

Los Angeles Times

time01-08-2025

  • Los Angeles Times

Ella Berman's ‘L.A. Women' is a breezy retro novel with bite — and lots of familiar characters

Ella Berman's third novel, 'L.A. Women,' is set in Laurel Canyon between the mid-'60s and mid-'70s. It's a perfect place and time for a novelist looking to establish a tense atmosphere: The dreamy, free-love atmosphere slowly curdled into hard drugs and the Manson murders. Sunshine turned to smog. Joni Mitchell's sprightly 'Ladies of the Canyon' album gave way to the melancholy 'Blue.' A scene early in the novel captures the dynamic, as locals assemble for a party in the home of Lane, an acclaimed novelist and journalist, while the bloom begins to fall off the rose: 'They are here because their world was so vivid, so beautiful, that they are all somehow willing to settle for a ghost version of it.' That line comes from Lane's perspective, and she has reasons to be cynical: In 1975, her marriage is crumbling, her second novel has taken a beating with the critics, and her estranged friend and fellow writer, Gala, has gone missing. That last plot point is the novel's drivetrain, because her disappearance exposes so many things about the culture of the time: flightiness, despair, drugs, loss and fear. Before their split, Lane and Gala were at the same time friends and rivals. In the late '60s, Lane was a nationally famous explainer of California culture, hard-edged but with a literary bent. (Think Joan Didion.) Gala was the free-spirit hanger-on in the city's club scene, falling for a rock singer and happily dishing about her Southern California misadventures. (Think Eve Babitz, with a dash of Carrie Bradshaw.) Gala gave Lane some valuable tough-love advice about the draft of her first novel, which moved Lane to open some doors for Gala at big-ticket magazines. They covered different worlds. What would be the harm? Over the course of Berman's novel, it becomes clear the answer is plenty. As the narrative shuttles back and forth between 1965 and 1976, Berman shows how messily entangled the two women's lives are, and that their influence on each other as writers is more porous than either wants to believe. 'L.A. Women' is in part a mystery novel, as Lane investigates Gala's disappearance. But she's questioning the sincerity of her motivations along the way. After all, her next book is a roman à clef about Gala, and writing about a woman who might be in dire straits would be exploitative. Or, rather, more exploitative. Gala's disappearance also prompts Lane to wonder what kind of fiction about her old friend would be most accurate. Is she a fallen starlet or a woman reinventing herself? She observes that one version of Gala 'would end up like so many L.A. women before her — violet and vomit-streaked in a stranger's bed at the Chateau, or maybe she would buy a baby grand piano and move to the coast to start over, bright-eyed and sober with a new sense of wonder for the world.' Resolving that question is as key to the book as Gala's location. In the meantime, Berman sets plenty of scenes in some of L.A.'s most famous landmarks: the Magic Castle, Musso & Frank's, the Chateau Marmont, and, hey, look, it's painter Ed Ruscha driving down Wilshire Boulevard! Such cameos feel a little tacked-on and obligatory, candy-colored as a Hockney painting. But the novel's truest setting is an emotional one, anyway; Berman's gift is for revealing the ways that attachment warps into envy, and how we rationalize or ignore those emotions even while they consume us. Berman suggests that, in some ways, the culture pushed both Gala and Lane into becoming adversaries. Though their writing styles are distinct, they're framed by others as rivals, particularly by men: 'Isn't that what most men wanted — to flatten women not into individuals with needs and wants and requirements, but into a vague, out-of-focus mass?' Men who fail to follow the rules wind up in the city's cultural thresher as well: The women's mutual friend, Charlie, a high-powered music-industry power broker (think David Geffen) has his status threatened once his homosexuality becomes an open secret. 'L.A. Women' is in many ways a breezy book, gentle about its crises and suggesting early on that a happy ending is in the offing. But thematically it has teeth. Media culture, Laurel Canyon culture, gender culture all conspire to keep Lane and Gala from being what a writer needs most to be: honest. For all of her storied flintiness, Lane strains to keep her feelings about Gala at a distance, and Gala refuses to acknowledge that she needs Lane to anchor her recklessness. But admitting to that sort of need requires a decade of emotional work, and the novel's strongest moments show how deep the struggle can run. 'Writers are always selling someone out,' the Lane-like journalist Janet Malcolm once famously wrote. The reasons for that are myriad: money, attention, a good story, status. 'L.A. Women' captures that range with admirable sensitivity. But at its core it grasps that the challenge is more fundamental: How we can treat the people close to us more as human beings and less like commodities. Or, as Gala puts it: 'It was infinitely more satisfying to be somebody rather than somebody's plus-one.' Athitakis is a writer in Phoenix and author of 'The New Midwest.'

Dead & Company's drummer is playing two very different S.F. shows — here's why
Dead & Company's drummer is playing two very different S.F. shows — here's why

San Francisco Chronicle​

time31-07-2025

  • San Francisco Chronicle​

Dead & Company's drummer is playing two very different S.F. shows — here's why

Jay Lane, the veteran Bay Area drummer known for his deep local roots and genre-spanning versatility, is preparing for two vastly different performances in San Francisco — one in front of tens of thousands of devoted Deadheads at Golden Gate Park, the other a laid-back hometown set with his own band at Thrive City. This weekend, he returns to the spotlight as Dead & Company — featuring original Grateful Dead members Bob Weir and Mickey Hart, alongside John Mayer, Oteil Burbridge, Jeff Chimenti and Lane — headlines a three-night run at the Polo Field, Friday to Sunday, Aug. 1-3. Each show is expected to draw around 60,000 fans, making it one of the largest gatherings in the park since Outside Lands and last year's concert featuring System of a Down. But Lane is equally focused on something smaller. On Aug. 8, he'll lead his group, Jay Lane & the Mayhem, at Thrive City's Harmonic Jam, a free community concert outside Chase Center. 'It's just a few close friends of mine playing some music together,' Lane said. 'It's going to be free, and hopefully we'll just get them dancing. That's my mission.' He's eager to do more shows in San Francisco, where his career began in the early 1980s, playing in groups like the Uptones and the Freaky Executives. 'It'd be nice to play around here more,' he said. 'Lord knows we need more local people playing out.' Although Lane is now firmly embedded in the Grateful Dead orbit, he didn't grow up a fan. 'I wasn't really a Deadhead,' he said. 'I think that's why I got the gig with Bob Weir. He wanted people that didn't have their minds made up about how it was supposed to go. He wanted some fresh takes.' Lane's connection to Dead & Company traces back to his work with Weir's band RatDog in the early '90s. At the time, he admits he knew little about the Dead's expansive catalog. 'I knew 'Touch of Grey,' but that was about it,' he said. 'And then I started listening and I was like, oh man, this goes deep.' His appreciation for the music grew especially after discovering recordings from the band's famed Europe '72 tour. 'They were writing music together in real time,' Lane said. 'It wasn't about solos — it was like collective, improvised composition. That opened me up.' Outside the Dead universe, Lane's résumé spans a who's who of Bay Area acts — from Alphabet Soup and the Charlie Hunter Trio to Les Claypool's bands Sausage and Primus. That last connection resurfaced recently when Primus launched a global search for a new drummer. Lane, who was part of the band's early lineup, said he wasn't expecting a call from Claypool. 'Les knew better than to ask me,' Lane said. 'We'd been down that road before when the schedules conflicted between the two worlds. But he spoke pretty highly of me during the auditions. He kept mentioning my name as some sort of bar to meet — which is very humbling.' Still, Lane admits that the energy surrounding the Grateful Dead community is unlike anything else. 'It's wild,' he said. Asked if the Golden Gate Park shows are truly a farewell for Dead & Company, Lane offered a measured response. 'I wouldn't know, man,' he said. 'That might be it for this year. But you know, if they call, I'll pick up.' As for the Thrive City gig, Lane said it provides a refreshing change of pace. 'Last time, there was like 20 people there,' he said. But with anticipation high during the Dead's 60th anniversary summer, that number may rise dramatically. Wherever he ends up playing, Lane says he's just grateful to keep moving. 'Here's hoping for some more gigs,' he said. 'It sure is fun.'

‘SI' Swim star flaunts ample assets in rare video in lacy red lingerie
‘SI' Swim star flaunts ample assets in rare video in lacy red lingerie

Yahoo

time21-07-2025

  • Yahoo

‘SI' Swim star flaunts ample assets in rare video in lacy red lingerie

Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Penny Lane hit the catwalk recently to flaunt her flawless bikini body in barely-there, red-hot lingerie. Wearing only super-high silver stilettos and a lacy red two-piece underwear set, Lane owned the runway, with a small cover-up over her arms that she let down as she hit the end of the catwalk. The stunning swimwear influencer and star wore her blonde hair down and huge sparkly earrings. Her only message on the July 11 TikTok share was the Italian caption, 'La lingerie rossa.' The comments gave the British model, 30, perfect scores across the board. 'Have mercy,' raved one. 'That's what perfect looks like,' agreed another. 'Perfection,' said a third. '11,' commented a third. Others went with, 'That's a whole lotta woman!!,' 'Now there is a woman,' 'Holy cow Batman' and 'That's confidence.' Lane is one of the most decorated models on the Sports Illustrated circuit. In 2023, she won the iconic magazine's Swim Search competition, and the next year was crowned the coveted Rookie of the Year title. This year marked her second consecutive appearance in the print edition. On May 31, Lane joined the other models from the 2025 SI swimsuit issue for a VIP-only, sold-out runway show to close out Miami Swim Week at the ultra-chic W South Beach hotel. Also hitting the catwalk were cover stars Livvy Dunne, Lauren Chan and Jordan Chiles; plus models such as Ellie Thumann, Katie Austin, Nicole Williams English, Ilona Maher, Camille Kostek and Denise Bidot. Read More! Blessed 'SI' Swim star risks too-small bikini top in slow-mo pool exit Bronzed 'SI' Swim model flaunts toned physique in string bikini 'SI' Swim model flaunts flawless bikini body in stunning 2-piece gown

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store