Family Literacy Day takes place annually on Jan. 27 to celebrate adults and children reading and learning together and to encourage Canadians to spend at least 15 minutes enjoying a learning activity as a family every day.

In 2011, Canadians will Play for Literacy! The Lethbridge Public Library has taken on the challenge of encouraging literacy in families through the use of board games, card games, word games and more. Throughout the day they will be offering story times, Scrabble tournaments, Wii on the big screen and additional fun activities for the entire family including scavenger hunts and a carnival. Details at http://www.lethlib.ca/

Also in the Theatre Gallery at the Main Branch on Friday, Jan. 28 at 7 p.m.. the Friday Night Films series will feature the award winning, The Social Network (PG - Coarse Language, Substance Abuse) – “One Fall night in 2003, Harvard undergrad and computer programming genius, Mark Zuckerberg, sits down at his computer and begins working on a new idea. In a fury of blogging and programming, what begins in his dorm room soon becomes a global social network and a revolution in communication. 

Facebook, six years and 500 million friends later, Mark is the youngest billionaire in history … but success leads to both personal and legal complications.  Jesse Eisenberg, Justin Timberlake and Andrew Garfield give outstanding performances as the young entrepreneurs.’’

Chapter’s downtown will host Canada Reads nominee, Angie Abdou on Saturday, Jan. 29, 2011. starting at 2 p.m. with a short reading and author Q & A at 4 p.m.

Abdou, whose novel The Bone Cage, is one of the five finalists for the 2011 Canada Reads event. Note to hockey fans everywhere: former NHL defender Georges Laraque is Angie's Canada Reads champion. More information about the author is available at http://www.abdou.ca/ .

Also playing out here in Lethbridge is my participation in the second annual Coffee Shop Author contest.

This growing in international popularity contest is a chance for authors to put their local coffee shops on the map as they pledge to work on a a novel, short story collection, poetry collection or a work of creative non-fiction at their chosen space between October 2010 and March 2011.

My coffee shop of choice for this contest is The Penny Coffee House, where you just might run into me working on my latest novel, enjoying a soy chai tea and blogging about the experience at http://www.coffeeshopauthor.com/blogs/greysenink