Welcome

Welcome to OLLI Connects, created by the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of South Florida.

We brought it to life in 2018 as part of our celebration of OLLI’s 25th Anniversary here at USF.  Let me introduce you to a few of the people who are keeping it going.

Veronica Maxwell, Director of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at USF

Cath Mason, Operations Manager for OLLI-USF and Managing Editor of OLLI Connects

Al Carlson, OLLI Connects Co-Editor and occasional Contributor

Theresa D’Aiuto Sokol, OLLI Connects Co-Editor and occasional Contributor

Diane White, OLLI Connects Consultant and Contributor

Diane Russell, OLLI Connects Contributor and Proofreader

The articles here have been written by OLLI members, and we invite you as an OLLI member to share your stories with us to help build our OLLI-USF community.   Write up your short story, your essay, your poetry, your OLLI experience, or any meaningful life experience and submit it to us by emailing it to connectsolli25@gmail.com.  Do you express yourself best through photos? Through videos? Great! We love sharing those, too.

The ideal length of a prose post is 500 to 1500 words, but this isn’t high school, and if the length of your article fits the idea you want to express, then that’s the right length, and we’ll try to find a way to share it.  If you are submitting poetry, photos, or video, what’s important is that you write enough to give our readers the context they need to appreciate your work.

You can make your prose or poetry submission much more interesting by including photographs.  They have to be your own photos, though.  OLLI does not want to be sued for publishing someone else’s copyrighted work!  (And if you’re not yet as proud of your photos as you’d like to be, visit our main site and look over our Course Catalog.  There are some great photography classes for digital photographers, whether you use a full-on digital camera or your smartphone.)

If you submit your article as an MS Word document attached to your email with your photos attached as JPEG’s, it will be easy for us to edit.  However, if you’re not an MS Word user and don’t know a JPEG from a PNG, don’t let that get in your way!  We’ll deal with what you send us and get back to you if we need to. For a complete list of our Submission Guidelines, click here.

To learn more about OLLI Connects, visit our FAQ, Contact and Comments page

–Editors