A meet and greet sponsored by Ellinwood Public Education and Library Foundation and Ellinwood Chamber of Commerce will be at 5 p.m. Dec. 9 at the Ellinwood High School Commons Area. 

The speaker will be Andrew Maraniss, author of “Games of Deception - The True Story of the  First U.S. Olympic Basketball Team at the 1936 Olympics in Hitler’s Germany.” The book details the invention of basketball and the formation of the team, but its core narrative explores how the Nazi regime used the Games as a propaganda spectacle to conceal the discrimination and growing threat of war within Germany, ultimately highlighting the deception of the event itself.

A New York Times bestselling author, Andrew Maraniss has written 10 sports and social justice nonfiction books for adults, teens, and children. And, he also has a new sports fiction series for children called Sports Zone, published by Scholastic. 

His books have received the Lillian Smith Book Award for civil rights, the RFK Book Award Special Recognition Prize for social justice, and the Sydney Taylor Honor

Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries. His books have also been named to the American Library Association’s Rainbow Book List and RISE Book List and Esquire Magazine’s list of “100 Best Baseball Books Ever Written.”

 A Vanderbilt graduate, Maraniss is now director of Special Projects at the Vanderbilt Athletic Department. He lives in Nashville, Tenn., with his wife Alison and two children.