Amid the nation’s culture wars and deep political divisions, conservatives’ drive to control what young people can read has taken on new intensity. The record number of challenges and bans levied on children’s and YA books has created an occupational hazard for authors, teachers, and librarians. We asked several authors how having their work targeted has affected their livelihood and their well-being.
The emotional toll
The majority of the authors we spoke with expressed bewilderment about why their books were banned. That feeling was quickly supplanted by frustration and anger upon learning that those who are pushing for bans have rarely read the books they are vilifying, instead cherry-picking language and passages out of context to create false narratives.
Ellen Hopkins, whose YA novels tackle tough subject matter like sexual abuse, addiction, and suicide, and have been regularly challenged in school and public libraries, tops the list of most-banned authors in America, according to PEN America’s November 2023 report. But she’s been saddled with another title that causes her significantly more pain. “There’s this one woman, Karen England [a conservative activist and president of nonprofit Capitol Resource Institute], who has been orchestrating school board stuff from California to New York, and she’s terming me ‘one of the top porn pushers in American schools,’ ” Hopkins says. “It’s more than hurtful. It makes me angry. It’s been hard to be accused of grooming children and being a pedophile when I’m nothing like that and she’s convincing people that I am. I’ve taken a lot of ugly social media stuff; I’ve learned the block button is my friend.”
Attacks on works reflecting the experiences of LGBTQ authors and authors of color have been especially egregious. Newbery Medalist Jerry Craft’s books (including New Kid and its sequels) have been challenged and removed from shelves for content said to be supportive of critical race theory, a development he finds mind-boggling. “I have kind of devoted my life to being the clean-cut cartoonist,” he says. “I did this graphic novel loosely based on my life and my sons’ lives and had gone out of my way not to have any cursing, drugs, sex, or anything that could be considered objectional to a kid audience.” Yet his books were still targeted. “I’ve gotten death threats via email or people saying, ‘You must suffer from some kind of mental illness in the fact that you think you need to indoctrinate an entire generation of kids.’ But indoctrinate how? For kindness and empathy, and loving people like they’re your brothers and sisters?”
New Kid is not “Black versus white,” Craft says. “It is about a 12-year-old kid really seeing stuff like race and class for the very first time, and how he deals with it. But the kids all become friends.” The kerfuffle over New Kid being challenged, then reinstated—after people read it—in Katy, Tex., in 2021 drew international media attention. “The sad truth is, had I not been banned, I would not have been on The ReidOut with Joy Reid, The Daily Show, NPR, BBC, and other major news outlets,” Craft says. “I would have liked to have been celebrated for being a history-making author instead.”
The Family Book by Todd Parr, a brightly hued picture book celebrating families of all varieties, sparked controversy upon its release in 2003 when, Parr remembers, students needed to have a permission slip for one of his readings at a local bookstore. “One of the hardest things is being a gay man and being called certain things just because you wrote a book that says some families have two moms or two dads,” he says. “That’s the gayest page of all my work, and it’s just stating a matter of fact, whether you agree with it or not. There is no agenda in my 60-some books except for helping kids feel better about who they are.”
Parrs adds that anti-LGBTQ vitriol has become even more intense as his books have become popular choices for drag queen storytime. And two of his titles are featured in the new MSNBC Films/New Yorker documentary short film It’s Okay, which focuses on two young brothers attending their first Drag Story Hour in North Carolina, where a bill has recently been introduced making it a felony to perform in drag for minors. “The new narrative around this is that it’s not just a banned or challenged book; it’s an evil book of grooming and all these horrible words that I’ve never even heard,” he says. “That hurts.”
Fearing for their safety
George M. Johnson, whose YA memoir All Boys Aren’t Blue recounts their childhood, adolescence, and college years as a queer Black youth in New Jersey and Virginia, believes that safety is the biggest issue for authors facing book bans, and that personal risk is exacerbated when authors travel for the school and library appearances that they rely on for their livelihoods. “People don’t realize how unsafe it is if a person who is very adamant about book banning recognizes you when you’re traveling, or in an airport, or at a restaurant,” they say. “I’ve had instances of that, and I almost got into a fight in an airport in Wisconsin because a guy did recognize my face when he followed me into the bathroom.”
Johnson notes that the man was from Iowa, where Gov. Kim Reynolds has previously spoken out against All Boys Aren’t Blue, including showing Johnson’s face and reading from the book on TV. “There really are some people who feel that we are terrible human beings and will come after us,” they say. “We live in a country where they shoot up kindergartners and they will shoot up a church, so why wouldn’t they shoot up a book event? We have to start thinking about it like that.”
Samira Ahmed is among those who now take extra precautions. During the tour for her book Internment, which envisions a fascist, Islamophobic near-future U.S. where Muslims are placed in internment camps, she received numerous threats, prompting her publisher, Little, Brown, to provide security at her Manhattan event. “I travel under an alias now, and I know for a fact that I’m not the only one,” she says. “Our book tours are publicized, of course, because we want people to show up. But at one location, prior to me getting there, someone had been calling all the local hotels in the vicinity of the bookstore to see if I was staying there. That person was not me, and it was not my publicist, and we were the only two people who knew where I was staying.”
She has declined to make some appearances for safety reasons, as well. When she received an invitation to speak with other authors at a library in a community that had legalized concealed carry of weapons in public, she says, “I told them I couldn’t go because my book had been banned recently in that area and I was genuinely worried about my safety. It’s terrible, because many authors like myself love meeting readers. It’s one of my favorite things to do, especially because I’m writing for teens.”
Author Debbi Michiko Florence says that she never felt unsafe at book events until the rise of anti-Asian hate and book bans in recent years. She recalled being especially frightened during a school visit in a small town in the Midwest when a large white man aggressively approached her at the table where she was signing books. “He was wearing camouflage and a trucker hat, and my heart leapt into my throat,” she says. “He leaned over and said, ‘I want to thank you for taking the time to come to our small community.’ ” She was thrilled—and admittedly relieved—but realized she would have never reacted that way before. “These book bans have made me hyperaware that there are people who don’t want me or my characters to exist.”
Coping
The ripples caused by book bans quickly spread to authors’ bank accounts, too. Johnson is among those seeing some falloff in earnings. “I think there’s also a fear of bringing us [to events] because they don’t want the backlash, and librarians don’t want to get fired,” they say. Like all the other authors we spoke with, Johnson finds that position understandable. “I told them, listen, if the difference is putting myself in the library and you keeping your job, please keep your job.”
Once an author’s work has been targeted, each subsequent project is under the microscope. As a result, “there’s this floating desire to self-censor,” Hopkins says, echoing many colleagues. She worries that her middle grade work-in-progress that involves a character who reads Aristotle and ends up having a discussion about queerness with her mother could be attacked. “It’s my job to provide books for kids who need them,” she says, “and there are middle grade kids who will need this book, too, so I can’t give in to that.” And Hopkins harbors another concern—that her titles will be disallowed simply based on her banning track record. “It’s my name on the cover. They’re not just censoring my book, they’re censoring me, personally.”
Many of the writers we contacted voiced their appreciation for the editors and publishers who have backed them even as the business climate becomes more difficult.
“I am a person who, if you tell me I can’t do something, I’m going to do it,” Johnson says. They point to their new title on the Harlem Renaissance, Flamboyants, out this month, as an example. “I just felt like, well, if you’re going to ban one queer book, then I’m just going to have to write more queer books, and you’ll have to ban all of them.”
But authors’ greatest praise goes to the educators who are on the front lines of the banning battle. Ahmed says she is moved every time a teacher comes to speak with her about her books being pulled or challenged. “They’re literally putting their jobs on the line just for kids to be able to have this fundamental right to read,” she says. “In my mind, they’re absolute heroes for doing this.”
Author Martha Brockenbrough agrees. “We need to look out for the teachers and librarians with meaningful protection.” She adds a reminder that in the end, “the biggest victims of this struggle are the kids we are all supposed to be serving—kids who’ve been marginalized and kids who are growing up in families that are doing the marginalizing. Encountering humanity on the page can make an extraordinary difference in their ability to be whole as adults.”
