Last month, I participated in the Mass Freedom to Read Advocacy Day at the State House in Boston, where members of our coalition met with legislators to try to push our freedom to read legislation forward.
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My next book is a memoir, and it incorporates free verse, found poetry, and lyric essay. In other words, it’s very different from my other books, but it also engages with a theme that runs through everything I’ve written.
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Last week, PEN America released its fourth annual report on the state of book banning and censorship in America, and I learned that Last Night at the Telegraph Club was the fourth most banned book in schools during the 2024-25 school year.
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I recently learned that my novel Last Night at the Telegraph Club, along with nine other books, has been challenged at the state level in South Carolina.
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Since 2021 and as of today, Feb. 4, 2025, six of my seven novels and two anthologies including my work have been censored in 96 cases across 20 states.
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Since my March 2024 update, I’ve noticed there are fewer cases in which individual school districts are banning lists of specific books. Instead, more statewide laws are being passed that are so vague and overarching that they’re likely to lead school districts to ban hundreds or thousands of books at a time.
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Back in October, I wrote a detailed post on how the national wave of book banning has targeted my books. For a couple of months afterward, I posted updates on instagram, but since December I haven't had the chance to do any more updates ... until now. I've been keeping a list, folks, and it's not very nice.
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Yesterday, I joined my publisher, Penguin Random House; the Iowa State Education Association; authors Laurie Halse Anderson, John Green, and Jodi Picoult; three Iowa educators; and an Iowa high school student and parent in filing a lawsuit against the state of Iowa and challenging Senate File 496, which was enacted in May 2023.
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