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The Friends of the Coffee County Libraries will have two events featuring an award-winning author who hails from Tullahoma.

There will be an event in both Manchester and Tullahoma. The Manchester event will take place on Sept. 21 in The Church at 117 E. Fort. St. at noon and last one hour.

The Tullahoma event will be Sept. 20 at noon, and will be held at The Atlantic at 205 NW Atlantic St. The deadline for reservations is Sept. 18 for both events and can be made by calling 931-581-3710. Tickets are $20 each.

The highlight of these events will be the speaker, Bud Willis, who is the author of Blue Stocking and Marble Mountain. Plus, he is a hometown guy who is coming home from Florida to speak. He graduated from Tullahoma High School and Tennessee Tech University. In 1963, he was commissioned as an officer in the United States Marine Corps and was decorated 32 times with air medals, having flown 640combat missions as a Marine medical evacuation pilot during the Vietnam conflict.

Later he began an investment career with J. C. Bradford & Co. in Nashville, becoming a partner and developing several branch offices from Ohio to Pensacola, Florida. While in Clarksville, he was awarded the city’s highest honor, the Community Achievement Award. In Pensacola, he was named Emerging Leader of the Year, Business Leader of the Year, and Community Leader of the Year, while serving as Commissioning Chairman of the billion dollar warship, the USS Mitscher, also earning him the Pride of Pensacola Award.

At the 1995 J.C. Bradford Leadership Convention, Bud was presented his company’s first Community Involvement Award after serving as Senator Lamar Alexander’s Presidential campaign coordinator in Pensacola.

The Tennessee Jaycees named him Tennessee’s Outstanding Young Man for service to his community, state, and country in a service in Gatlinburg sponsored by Elvis Presley, who had previously received that honor.

As a writer, he was awarded the prestigious “Southern Writer’s Award” in Memphis joining previous notables such as John Grisham, Shelby Foote, Eudora Welty among others. He and his wife, Lee, also appeared on the TODAY show on NBC with Kathy Lee and Hoda Kotb with a story from his book ‘Bluestocking.’

With all these accolades and a writer’s mind, you are sure to be entertained when you hear him speak.