Let’s Donate THE HATE U GIVE to Katy, Texas Readers & Defy The Book’s Censorship

January 8, 2018 |

If you haven’t heard or kept tabs on the story, Katy, Texas ISD pulled all copies of Angie Thomas’s best selling YA novel The Hate U Give from shelves. This came after a single complaint from a middle age white man who was appalled by reading the first 10 pages of the book and deemed it inappropriate for the students of the school. Rather than follow the process for book removal as outlined by school policy, the book was unilaterally removed from all school library shelves. More details about the pulling of the book can be found here.

This all happened in early December, and when the holidays rolled around, the rage and anger about the school’s decision seemed to have died down across social media. It took a lot of effort to find further news about the status of the book as of now, but thanks to a number of librarians, I’ve confirmed the book is still not on shelves.

Which means it’s time we do something.

After a lot of debating the best way to go about this, library friend and colleague Sylvie Juliet Shaffer gave me a brilliant idea. Rather than seeking out a single place for distributing the books, why not take advantage of the Little Free Libraries throughout Katy?

An idea was born.

Here’s What We Are Doing

Starting today, you can purchase a copy of Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give from one of numerous wish lists on Amazon (linked below). Those wish lists are linked to individuals in the Katy area who are going to drop copies of the books into local Little Free Libraries, guerrilla style. This will allow readers to find them all over town and not only can they find them, they get to keep copies of the book. The idea is they’ll spread the word — along with our help, of course — and more copies of the book will land in the hands of more readers there.

Maybe the school can keep the book off their shelves. But they can’t keep the book from the hands of readers who are hungry for it and for whom it will be a life-changing, empowering book.

Ground Team

Thanks to the help of Katy Cronk, Kristin McWilliams, Jasmine Lee, Jaison Oliver, Breonna Brownlee, and many others, books will be distributed. Books from the wish lists below will be sent to those individuals, who will then deposit them in Katy’s local Little Free Libraries. Each wish list is for 50 titles as a way to see what sorts of numbers we’re sending down, and more copies will be sought as we continue.

All books must be sent via Amazon. This is done for the purposes of keeping addresses anonymous and not making someone work as a middle person to collect all of the books for redistribution. It keeps time and effort down for everyone who is volunteering to help make this possible.

You can send as many copies as you’d like to from any of the lists.

How You Can Help

Buy a copy or two or ten of the book from the lists below. Can’t afford to? SHARE these lists with anyone you wish to. Share this post, too, so the entire back story is also known.

The more word is spread, the more the local readers will know and have access to the book. The more the kids will know. This works and has worked in previous, similar situations. So even if you can’t lay out cash to buy the book to help, your voice and your share really does make a difference.

The Lists

These will be updated as more folks volunteer to help out. Again, there are multiple lists because each one will direct to a different volunteer.

Why This Matters

We’re getting books to kids. For free. We’re reminding them we see and hear them. That their lives and stories matter. And, in the case of this particular book, we’re reminding black teenagers that their lives matter and that their stories and voices are vital, appreciated, and honored.

Thanks to everyone who helped get this set up and thanks to you for reading and helping out in whatever way you can. You can stay on top of this situation and engage in other ways to support the book by checking out this piece at ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom. The Katy ISD school board will be meeting on January 15 to discuss this issue further, and you can learn more about what’s going on by following librarian Courtney Kincaid on Twitter, who is involved with the Texas Library Association, the Office of Intellection Freedom with ALA, and has been sharing news about the book’s removal from Katy ISD shelves as it develops.

Some Girls Are Donation Drive: The Response

September 9, 2015 |

A quick post to share a few links to stories that wrap up and are the direct result of the amazing outpouring of donations to get Some Girls Are into the hands of teens in Charleston.

First, I wrote about the process and final send out results at Book Riot. This post hit reddit, and then later on, it hit the front page of reddit. That sort of readership — and the result was overwhelmingly positive — made me even prouder of what we were able to make happen. Along with getting books to teens, we raised the issue of censorship with a huge audience that may otherwise never understood how it works. Here’s the piece.

Meanwhile, down in Charleston, the local news channels have been running with the story. ABC 4 interviewed Andria about the donation drive, and that helped get the word out to the community to come out and pick up books. According to Andria, the library nearest to West Ashley is already asking for more copies since they’ve been being picked up quickly.

CBS 5 in Charleston also interviewed Andria, and this particular video is more than worth the watch. One of the teens who read the book talks about it and how much it mattered to her. A mother, too, is interviewed about the book and both highlight why I wanted to help with this initiative. Watch it here and prepare to get misty-eyed like me.

This afternoon, a reporter from the Charleston Post and Courier gave me a call, and we talked about book challenges, my experiences working with teens, and I rambled at great length about intellectual freedom and teenagers. Here’s the piece.

Thanks to everyone who helped make this possible. The impact is not small, and I couldn’t be prouder than seeing and hearing about the teens who are picking up the book and opening up conversations, among themselves and with adults in their lives.

Change Can Happen

August 22, 2015 |

This morning, I finished sending off 30 boxes of Some Girls Are down to Andria Amaral at Charleston County Public Library. She’ll be working to get all of the books out to teens at West Ashley High School who would like a copy, for free, since they had the option of reading this book over the summer removed from them. If you don’t know the backstory to this situation, NCAC has a great wrap-up, including a look at how the administration failed to follow their own policies in this situation. That one parent can do this is unacceptable. . . but look what we, the book community, did in response:

In addition to the over 830 copies being sent down, more copies are trickling into my house still, which will be packed and sent next week. Further, when asked if people could help with the cost of shipping the books, you all rose to the challenge, too, sending over $600 to help cover shipping.

The total cost of shipping, in the interest of being transparent, was $450. For 30 boxes ranging in weight from 20 to 45 pounds, that feels like a steal, especially knowing the impact this will have on the lives of those teens. Of course, the book will touch them, but what really matters here, and what this will really and truly show to those teens, is how much they matter. How much people care about them. How they have advocates in their own community who want to allow them the opportunity to find themselves.

That is a feeling that cannot be articulated or measured.

We’ve done right by these teens, and I cannot wait to share what happens when Andria receives the books and puts them into the hands of teens. The thought really does bring tears to my eyes.

If you’re wondering what came of the additional $150 donated for shipping, it’s this:

I sent 100 copies directly to Andria.

There will be a longer, more in-depth piece coming when the books are distributed, but I wanted to send a tremendous and heart-felt thank you to everyone. This project was incredible and moving, and it really reiterated to me how wonderful the book community is and how much you care about the well-being of teenagers.

Teens don’t get that every day. Teens who have situations like this happen certainly don’t feel respected or cared about. They learn early on that the things that impact them are too much to be seen or talked about.

But we’re going to show them the opposite.

Thank you. Truly. I am honored and moved to be part of such a thoughtful, generous community.

This is what change and advocacy and passion look like.

Let’s Make Change Happen Right Now

July 30, 2015 |

I’m not going to write a lengthy post about the removal of Courtney Summers’s Some Girls Are as an optional — OPTIONAL — reading choice for students at West Ashley High School in Charleston, South Carolina. I’m going to instead direct you to Courtney’s impassioned discussion of this challenge to her book, along with Leila Roy’s commentary, and commentary from the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.

I am a staunch advocate of intellectual freedom and have been since day one. I find it horrifying and small minded when one parent’s problem with material overrides the rights of every student to have access to material that not only impacts their lives, but that they would have the opportunity to discuss and engage with under the guide of adults who care about them and who want them to KNOW that they’re cared about.

To say this particular removal — one laden with missteps and subverting policies left and right — feels particularly brutal is an understatement.

So I’m doing something.

Thanks to a few phone calls, I was in touch with Andria Amaral at the Charleston County Library System about what could be done to get this book into the hands of the teens who want them. She feels as passionately about this as I do, as she said to me that she wants to stand at the door of the high school and pass this book out to kids. More copies of the book have been purchased for the library for their access, too.

Let’s do something together with our collective reader, intellectual freedom loving power, shall we? Can we get this book into the hands of kids of West Ashley who want it?

If you are willing to buy a copy of Summers’s Some Girls Are, I will send it down to Andria, who will get it into those kids hands for free.

Between now and August 17, I would love to see my house become overfilled with copies of this book. I will box them up and ship them all down to Andria that week, so she can get them into the hands of eager readers. Because Andria is also coordinating the efforts of the Cynthia Hurd memorial donations, it is easier for me to collect everything and send them down to her once, rather than have them trickle in to her.

Think this is a costly endeavor? Let me direct you to how you can participate, even if you’re short on funds.

Some Girls Are is currently $1.99 on Book Outlet, and What Goes Around, which is a bind-up of Summers’s Cracked Up To Be and Some Girls Are is $1. Right now, there are over 200 copies between the two of these books on Book Outlet. Let’s make them all disappear.

Can you spring $1 or $2 or $10 to get this book to these kids? It seems like a cheap way to tell these teenagers that their voices — their lives — really do matter.

You can, of course, send a copy from anywhere. I am not going to do anything but drop them into a big box to ship out.

If you want to take part, please drop your name and email in this form, and I will email you with my mailing address to make this happen. If you cannot participate yourself, please pass this along to anyone who might want to help out.

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Appropriate Literature: Guest Post by Elana K. Arnold

March 23, 2015 |

Today’s “About the Girls” guest post is from author Elana K. Arnold. She’s here to talk about the idea of “appropriate literature” and how that applies to girls, girls reading, and feminism.

Elana K. Arnold has a master’s degree in Creative Writing from UC Davis. She writes books for and about young people and lives in Huntington Beach, California with her family and more than a few pets. Visit Elana at www.elanakarnold.com.

A few days ago, I got an email. This is what it said:

“My 13 year old daughter is interested in reading your books. I research novels before she reads them to ensure they are age appropriate. Can you please provide me with information regarding the sexual content, profanity, and violence so I can make an informed decision.”

The subject of the email was: Concerned Mother.

I’m not proud to admit that my first reaction was a twist in my stomach, a lurching sensation. Was I attempting to lead her daughter astray, were my books nothing more than thinly disguised smut, or pulp?

And I wasn’t sure how to respond. Yes, my books have sexual content. They have profanity. There is violence. But my books—like all books—are more than a checklist, a set of tally marks (Kisses? 6. Punches thrown? 4.)

Then I began thinking about myself at thirteen, about what was appropriate for me in that year, and those that followed.

When I was thirteen, I read whatever I wanted. No one was watching. Largely I found books in my grandmother’s home library. I roamed the shelves and chose based on titles, covers, thickness of the spines. I read All You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex (But were afraid to ask). I read The Stranger. I read Gone with the Wind. And I read at home too, of course, and in school—Anne of Green Gables and Bridge to Terabithia and Forever.

Those early teen years were steeped in sex, even though I wasn’t sexually active. In junior high school, there were these boys who loved to snap the girls’ bras at recess. I didn’t wear a bra, though I wished desperately for the need to. I was sickened by the thought that one of the boys might discover my secret shame, reach for my bra strap and find nothing there.

So one day I stole my sister’s bra and wore it to school. All morning I was aware of the itch of it, its foreign presence. I hunched over my work, straining my shirt across my back so the straps would show through.

At recess, I wandered dangerously near the group of boys, heart thumping, hoping, terrified. Joe Harrison did chase me—I ran and yelped until he caught me by the arm, found the strap, snapped it.

And then his words—“What are you wearing a bra for? You don’t have any tits.”

The next year, there was a boy—older, 15—who didn’t seem to care whether or not I needed a bra. We kissed at a Halloween party, just days after my thirteenth birthday. I was Scarlett O’Hara. He was a 1950’s bad boy, cigarettes rolled into the sleeve of his white T-shirt. He was someone else’s boyfriend.

The next day at school, a well-meaning girl whispered to me, just as class was about to start, “If you’re going to let him bang you, make him finger bang you first. That way, it won’t hurt as much.”

Later that year, before I transferred schools when my family moved away, my English teacher told me I was talented, and that he would miss me. Then he kissed me on the mouth.

The next year, a high school freshman, I was enrolled in Algebra I, and I didn’t think I was very good at it. Truthfully, I didn’t pay much attention to whatever the math teacher/football coach was saying up there, preferring to scribble in my notebook or gaze into half-distance, bringing my eyes into and out of focus.

On the last day of class, the teacher called me up to his desk. “You should fail this class,” he told me. “You went into the final with a D, and you got less than half of the questions right.”

I had never failed a class. I was terrified.

“But,” he went on, smiling, “I’m gonna give you a C-, because I like the way you look in that pink leather miniskirt.”

At fifteen, a sophomore, I took Spanish. I raised my hand to ask a question, and the teacher—who liked the students to call him Señor Pistola—knelt by my desk as I spoke. When I finished, instead of answering me he said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t hear a word. I was lost in your beautiful eyes.”

I wasn’t having sex. I had only kissed one boy. But still, I was brewing in it—sex, its implications, my role as an object of male desire, my conflicting feelings of fear and excitement.

Recently, I taught an upper division English class at the University of California, Davis. The course topic was Adolescent Literature. Several of my book selections upset the students, who argued vehemently that the books were inappropriate for teens because of their subject matter—explicit sexual activity, sexual violence, and incest. The Hunger Games was on my reading list, too, a book in which the violent deaths of children—one only twelve years old—are graphically depicted. No one questioned whether that book was appropriate. Of course, none of the characters have sex. Not even under the promise of imminent death do any of the featured characters decide to do anything more than kiss, and even the kissing scenes end before they get too intense.

So I think about the mother who wrote me that email, asking me, Are your books appropriate for my daughter? I think about the girl I was at thirteen, and the girls I knew. The girl who told me about finger banging. The other girls my English teacher may have kissed. The girls who had grown used to boys groping their backs, feeling for a bra strap, snapping it.

I think, What is appropriate? I want to tell that mother that she can pre-read and write to authors and try her best to ensure that everything her daughter reads is “appropriate.” But when I was thirteen, and fourteen and fifteen, stealing my sister’s bra and puzzling over the kiss of the boy at the party, the kiss of my teacher in an empty classroom, what was happening to me and around me and inside of me probably wouldn’t have passed that mother’s “appropriate” test. Still, it all happened. To a good girl with a mother who thought her daughter was protected. Safe.

And it was the books that I stumbled upon—all on my own, “inappropriate” books like Lolita and All You Ever Wanted to Know about Sex—these were the books that gave me words for my emotions and my fears.

Maybe the books I write are appropriate. Maybe they are not. But I think it should be up to the daughters to make that decision, not the mothers. Censorship—even on a familial level—only closes doors. We may want to guard our daughters’ innocence, we may fear that giving them access to books that depict sexuality in raw and honest ways will encourage them to promiscuity, or will put ideas in their heads.

I don’t think our daughters need guardians of innocence. I think what they need is power.

Let your daughter read my books, Concerned Mother. Read them with her. Have a conversation. Tell her your stories. Let her see your secrets, and your shames. Arm your daughter with information and experience.

Give her power.

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