A Poet’s Return: Pavel Šrut’s Worm-Eaten Light
"For 10 years after Worm-Eaten Light was banned, Pavel couldn’t write poetry even if he’d wanted to because it had lost its meaning in new reality of normalization. Through… More
Outsider Nonfiction
"I did not set out to write a definitive transgender book. I wrote and photographed six individuals, ages 16 to 22, who fall under the transgender umbrella. This left… More
The Color Purple and the Toppling of American Gods
"In The Color Purple lies the truth, in its pages lie glorious, flammable ideas: how many fires could be lit with the simple, indomitable truth that a Black girl… More
The Principal of the Thing
"Covertly removing books is a way of circumventing any conversation about why you are removing these books from libraries and, in effect, schools, necessary if you were to officially… More
Perumal Murugan, a Literary Suicide
"The trend in India of writers being harassed and stigmatized for their work is troubling. It is imperative that writers from both inside and outside India support these voices,… More
Don’t Pity the Subject Being Smashed, Rage at the Object Doing the Smashing
"That is why The Bluest Eye is dangerous and always situated on a banned books list. It exposes the violence that besets the human condition as a result of… More
Cold War Dress Code: Remembering Inna Lisnyanskaya
Paradoxically, the Metropole affair both silenced Lisnyanskaya as a poet in the USSR and liberated her from the restrictions imposed by publishing (self-censorship being an obligatory tool in the… More
Ban, Restriction, Whatever!: On Ted Dawe’s Into the River
Long time children's and young adult librarian, judge for children's book awards, Trustee of the Storylines Children’s Literature Charitable Trust of New Zealand, and literary agent Frances Plumpton discusses… More
Gutted: How Kathy Acker’s “Blood and Guts in High School” Saved My Life
This book, this author, this girl body said: Make art. A girl is born and we make a story of her. Daughter. Lover. Wife. Mother. In Kathy Acker’s… More
Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” Trilogy and the Preemptive Censorship of Writers of Color
What if the preemptive banning of marginalized writers is just as much a cause of trauma as racist story-telling by powerful white writers? More
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