Disobedience Press in Ann Arbor, Mich., made its debut this month with the release of a book that has already earned support from the likes of PEN America and the American Booksellers Association. Trouble in Censorville: The Far Right’s Assault on Public Education and the Teachers Who Are Fighting Back, edited by Nadine M. Kalin and Rebekah Modrak, with a foreword by Jonathan Friedman, managing director of PEN America’s U.S. Free Expressions Program, was released on July 1.
Copies of the book, which ABA CEO Allison Hill describes as a “collection of powerful stories from the front lines” of the ongoing battle over banned books, are included in the ABA’s July “white box” of promotional items sent to the organization’s bookstore members every other month.
Trouble in Censorville is a compilation of narratives by 14 teachers and librarians across the country about their experiences with book bans and the people behind them, and the impact that both have had on their personal and professional lives. The book also provides historical precedents for recent attacks on public education, with a timeline extending back to the Reconstruction Era. It concludes with a call to action for various groups—including teachers, parents, and community members—looking to curb book bans, beginning with the suggestion to “show up at school board meetings.”
The idea for the book began to take shape several years ago, when Modrak, a professor at the University of Michigan and self-described critic of consumer culture, started watching televised local school board meetings. “I was dismayed to hear the comments parents were making,” she said. “They were using a lot of consumer culture rhetoric to try to influence teachers—treating public schools like the private school experience, but funded with taxpayer dollars. I was really fascinated and of course concerned. Ann Arbor ostensibly is a very liberal, Democratic city, but then-President Trump was repeating this rhetoric.”
As Modrak and Kalin, a colleague who teaches art education at the University of North Texas began discussing Modrak's analyses, legislation limiting what teachers could talk about in classrooms and what school librarians could put on shelves was being introduced in various states. Prompted by such legislation, as well as the disturbing stories they were hearing from teachers, the two put out a call to educators, asking them for their personal accounts.
“We were motivated by the idea that there are teachers all around the country that these things are happening to,” Modrak said, relating a story about a teacher who was put on leave for using nonbinary pronouns and wearing pants in the classroom instead of dresses and skirts. “They’re afraid to speak up, but they desperately want to tell their stories. We also want parents to understand what is going on.”
Modrak approached Nick Tobier, a colleague at UM who is the founder and publisher of Disobedience Press, an imprint of Michigan Publishing Services. MPS is affiliated with the university and primarily serves students, faculty, and staff there, although it works externally with small presses as well. While Disobedience Press, like MPS’ s other imprints, has full editorial control, MPS handles distribution, printing, marketing, and sales.
Disobedience Press was launched, Tobier noted, to amplify the voices of “people who are willing to be troublemakers” by speaking up against censorship and actively resisting other threats to personal and intellectual freedoms. Tobier’s goal is to publish essays in a paperback format that “are small—between a booklet and a book.” A 300-page volume like Trouble in Censorville, he admits, may or may not be an anomaly on the Disobedience Press list, but he wanted to publish it because “it was an opportunity: it related to other activism on campus, and it seemed urgent.” He added that it also made more sense to him to collect essays on a single issue and publish them in one volume, “rather than to print 14 different pamphlets.”
Tobier’s aim is to publish “two high quality books per year” on a consistent publication schedule and “with a recognizable format, so when you walk into a bookstore you see those books lined up.” This fall, Disobedience Press will release fall the booklet All Art is a Political Statement by Croatian artist Arijana Lekić-Fridrih.
