Banned Books Event
- Jul 21
- 1 min read
A week ago I was fortunate to participate in an Authors Against Book Bans event here in Richmond. Local children's book author Meg Medina organized the meeting with the team from Book People bookstore, where it was held. She asked me to kick off the evening with a reading from a banned book, so I chose one of the originals, D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, and discovered I had a first edition 1959 paperback of the novel - a dime store paperback (50-cents) - in the attic! Read it again ahead of the meeting (think I'd first read it in high school), a sweet romantic tale with quite straightforward sex scenes, clearly the template for the sea of romance novels that has followed in its wake.
Here's a rehearsal video of my reading, btw:
Reporter Suzanne Boothby from the Henrico Citizen newspaper attended the event and wrote up a quite thorough article that I think is worth a read. She notes that since 2021, there have been 23,000 book bans in American public schools.
If you'd like to learn more about the Banned Books pandemic, and how to fight back, here's the Authors Against Book Bans website and the PEN America website, both of which share information on the topic, and offer strategies for fighting back.
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