Seattle bookworms wined and dined with local authors at $100 a plate to benefit the University of Washington Libraries Saturday night.

The third annual Friends of the Libraries event, called Literary Voices, was held on campus at the University of Washington Club. About 150 people, including local authors and faculty from the UW, attended the formal event.

Sherman Alexie, author of the screenplay Smoke Signals, was the keynote speaker for the evening. His latest book, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, garnered him the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.

“For me, librarians are sex symbols,” he said to the audience, which erupted into peals of laughter. “Something about nearsighted women and oatmeal colored sweaters.”

Alexie is an artist-in-residence with the Department of American Ethnic Studies.

“It’s great to be here in my hometown supporting libraries,” he said.

He went on to read part of his next novel, Radioactive Love Song, which is set in Seattle and will be published in May.

Attendees were urged to donate during the event. The money raised will go toward grants for special library projects, former Friends board president Jim Rupp said.

“There’s so many authors with the UW that you can go on for a while,” Rupp said.

Last year, about $20,000 went to grants, said A.C. Peterson, the UW Libraries development marketing and events manager.

It is too early to know the total raised from this event, she said.

Libraries in need pitch proposals to the Friends of the Libraries board, which distributes the funds. The funds go to everything from helping the campus’ Asian library support visiting scholars to building an informational kiosk in the Engineering Library, said Claudia Skelton, secretary of the board.

“It’s up to them,” she said. “What do they need?”

Literary Voices has aided projects by bringing authors and book lovers together since 2006.

“Everybody here loves libraries and books,” Skelton said. “It doesn’t get any better than this.”

Many of the authors at the event wanted to give back to the institutions that provide materials integral to their writing.

Leslie and Jack Hamann spent hours at the libraries looking through the UW’s extensive newspaper collection.

The libraries are an absolutely incredible resource, Leslie Hamann said.

Her husband wrote On American Soil, about black soldiers wrongly accused of lynching an Italian prisoner of war in Seattle during World War II.

Hamann’s book helped overturn the conviction decades later, and a movie may be made based on the book.

One of the attendees, Jan Faull, a columnist at The Seattle Times, takes advantage of the UW Libraries’ academic journals.

“What would we do without them?” she said of the libraries.

Author David Laskin hosted a table and was joined by his wife, a faculty member in the UW School of Law. His book, The Children’s Blizzard, about a deadly 1880 Midwest blizzard, required substantial background information, he said.

“The UW library has never let me down,” he said.

[Reach reporter Erinn Unger at news@thedaily.washington.edu.]