Looking for a new way to engage with your UMGC community?
Your UMGC Alumni Association is excited to introduce the Virtual Book Club! Join today and start connecting with fellow alumni and current students through a love of reading, lifelong learning, novels, and other books. Continue below for more information.
Reading Schedule
- On March 14th, visit Before the Book in our forum and begin reading The Mango Tree
- Section 1: by March 28th, finish reading through Chapter 9
- Section 2: by April 4th, finish reading through Chapter 19
- Section 3: by April 11th, finish reading through Chapter 23
- Section 4: by April 25th, finish reading through Chapter 28
- By May 2nd, finish reading the book and join our After the Book forum discussion
Live Q&A Author Talks
Click below to register today to join a virtual live Q & A discussion with authors to learn about the thoughts behind their books and more.
- Author Talk with Kate Washington of "Already Toast"
Thursday, April 17 | 6 p.m. Eastern Time | Online - Author Talk with Joyce Maynard of "The Bird Hotel"
Tuesday, May 6 | 3 p.m. Eastern Time | Online - Author Talk with Annabelle Tometich of "The Mango Tree"
Thursday, May 8 | 5 p.m. Eastern Time | Online
Virtual Book Club FAQs
We plan to start the book club by reading one book every two months. The texts selected will be lifelong learning, personal growth, novels and other books and take an average of nine hours to read cover to cover. If you have between 1 and 2 hours a week to read you should be fine.
No, the book club will be entirely online. You can participate anywhere you have Internet access and on days and times that are convenient to you.
Participation is free for the UMGC community!
Participants can get books for free at their local library or purchase them.
The book club will have a moderator from PBC Guru who manages the forum where discussions occur online. The moderator will pose questions to the book club, share relevant articles and facilitate conversation about topics in the book. Members will be encouraged to post and share as well. This format allows for ongoing conversation and makes it easy for readers to connect with each other through the forum.
Professional Book Club (PBC) Guru is a book club management company that works with businesses, alumni associations and professional societies. We are teaming up with PBC to put this program in place for the UMGC community. You can check out their website at www.pbc.guru if you want to see more of what they do.
We're using a private forum to host the virtual book club so it's easy to connect with fellow alumni. During our sign up process, you will enter the information to auto-generate your free profile. After you complete the sign up, we'll send you a link to the forum and you can begin to post right away!
Feel free to send an email to info@pbc.guru and we'll be happy to help.