Lisa Tolin
PEN America
Excerpt: In her 30 years as a school librarian, Jill Blake fielded the occasional request from parents who didn’t want their child to read a book – Harry Potter, for example. Then in 2022, the floodgates opened, and challenges started rolling in.
A new law in Virginia, where she is a school librarian, required schools to list their “sexually explicit” instructional materials. Shakespeare made the list. The district received a dozen book challenges; she noticed that all of the challenged books were from a Moms for Liberty list. “(The law) just makes teachers afraid in general. I have been called a porn peddler in an open meeting,” Blake told PEN America. “One person on Facebook has said I should be stoned to death.”
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