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Podcast: Drawing a Dialogue
Episode:

Hands Off Our Books!
Category: Arts
Duration: 00:00:00
Publish Date: 2026-03-08 13:40:03
Description:

This past weekend I had the honor of joining fellow authors Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie and Padma Venkatraman, as well as moderator Christina Bevilacqua, in conversation about book bans and censorship at LitArts RI. (I also want to thank James Baumgartner who interviewed me for PBS and NPR about this event. View the video they created from my interview here!)

We talked about the path to passing Rhode Island’s own Freedom to Read Bill, and I once again shared the story I shared at the state house. The bill involved a lot of amazing people, including the Rhode Island chapter of Authors Against Book Bans.

We celebrated our wins, while also impressing upon the audience the importance of continuing to stay involved in advocacy against censorship. We talked about ways to respond, such as supporting BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ authors, independent publishers, bookstores and public libraries. We especially told people to call their reps now and fight HR 7661.

My fellow panelists talked not only about obvious book bans, such as my book The Breakaways ending up on removal lists, but soft censorship as well. When an author is of marginalized identity, there can be cases where places such as libraries and schools won’t even choose to purchase the book in the first place. They are acting out of fear.

Something I’ve been reflecting on is how much book banners lie. People who want to stop you from reading lie about the content of the books, they lie about what’s happening in schools and libraries, and they lie about who authors and cartoonists are. (I understand why sometimes these lies can create worry, and so I encourage readers who want to learn about the scaffolding of subjects in age-appropriate ways to read my blog post here about Queer Subjects for All Ages.)

And these lies support taking books away from kids, which isn’t just one or two books, but represents a systemic desire to create an illiterate population. They want our kids to grow up without knowledge and without knowing themselves.

This anti-intellectualism wants us to not only never read books, but they also want us to police other people. They want us to fight each other, to tear each other down. They’re trying to defund our public schools and libraries and to turn us against each other. But we won’t do it. We will continue to fight for each other, and fight for accessible education for everyone.

This isn’t about one or two books. This is about systemic oppression of regular folks, you, your neighbors. We’ve seen it all over the country in other ways. Books are just one avenue for this fascism. And we are going to stop them.

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