Posted on December 14, 2022 at 12:00 PM by Sadye Scott-Hainchek
NPR is looking to highlight authors whose work has been challenged or banned around the US.
Today, that writer is Ashley Hope Pérez, whose 2015 novel Out of Darkness landed on the American Library Association's banned book list in 2021.
The YA book is set against an actual historical event — a natural gas explosion that killed almost three hundred people at a Texas school in 1937 — but features a love story in front of it.
Pérez, a literature professor in addition to author, takes issue with the accusation that her novel (and countless others) as "pornographic" merely because it depicts sexual experience.
You can read excerpts of Pérez's interview or listen to the entire conversation on NPR's website, and you can also read Pérez's essay on how book bans deprive young people of stories that help them learn.
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Categories: Today in Books