Freed Between the Lines: Banned Books Week at King Library
King Library is celebrating Banned Books Week with a number of activities hosted by SJSU faculty and community members.
What does it mean to ban a book? What impact does it have on schools, libraries and communities at large? According to Emily Drabinski, former president of the American Library Association (ALA), “a ‘book ban’ is the removal of a title from a library when someone raises an objection to a library material, program or service.” In 1982, the ALA established Banned Books Week to unite readers, educators, librarians and community members in shared support of the freedom to read. The theme this year is “Freed Between the Lines.”
San José State’s Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library is recognizing Banned Books Week this year with a series of events, panels, workshops and lectures held virtually and in person from September 22-28. King Library partnered with SJSU’s School of Information, the Departments of African American Studies, Humanities, English and Comparative Literature; the SJSU’s Pride Center, the San José Public Library, and The Culture Work of Poetry (a student organization) to offer engaging dialogues about everything from quiltmaking tapestries as a metaphor for storytelling to zine writing, artificial intelligence and censorship, comics and the suppression of diverse voices.
SJSU Librarian Estella Inda with collaborators have organized a week-long program highlighting the importance of giving people access to diverse voices and perspectives, especially those from underserved communities.
“Banned Books Week is important to me because as a youth, I stopped reading when I was not able to find books I could relate to. It took me many years to get back into books and the thought that happening to someone else frightens me. Having access to books with diverse voices rekindled my interest in reading and made me the librarian I am today. Every story deserves to be told!” says Inda.
The week kicks off with a performance by Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and spoken word artist Aideed Medina, who brings awareness to past and present day oppression with the suppression of words from marginalized communities through spoken word.
Keenan Norris
Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing Keenan Norris, who will be offering a lecture and dialogue called “Black and Banned” on September 26, explains that the week highlights two major societal issues.
“The first is the longstanding hostility to free thought, free speech, academic freedom and the life of the mind,” Norris says. “This isn’t new. Unfortunately, there’s always been a deep anti-intellectual, reactionary aspect to the U.S. The second issue is the recent banning of books by and about non-white people and LGBTQ people in K-12 school districts across the country. This is the immediate problem that Banned Books Week brings attention to and attempts to combat.”
Carmen Estela Kennedy Saleh
Carmen Estela Kennedy Saleh, ’21 MFA Creative Writing, ’26 EdD, African American Studies lecturer at SJSU, is one of the SJSU faculty members hosting an event at the library. On September 25, she will screen the Netflix documentary “Stamped,” based on Ibram X. Kendi’s best-selling book “Stamped From The Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America,” and facilitate a dialogue in King Library 225 about the censorship of diverse voices.
“I hope SJSU students and community members will learn about the historical precedents regarding book banning,” she says. “I hope they learn how this is tied to broader, racialized projects that wage educational warfare on students of color. I hope they become uncomfortable in ways that might inspire them to defend literary access and freedom.”
Additional workshops and panels include Assistant Professor of Creative Nonfiction Brook McClurg; Associate Professor of Digital Humanities Kim Brilliante Knight; Associate Professor of Creative Writing Keenan Norris; Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature Maite Urcaregui; Associate Professor of American Studies and Literature Daniel Lanza Rivers; User Experience Librarian Sharesly Rodriguez; Director of the School of Information Anthony Chow; and Digital Scholarship Librarian Nick Szydlowski. All Banned Books Week events are free and open to the public.
“Academic libraries are important partners in raising awareness of censorship and in promoting intellectual freedom, individual rights to read, open discourse and the access to information,” says Michael Meth, dean of King Library. “When looking at books on the banned book lists, it is apparent that the works that are being targeted are those of marginalized voices, often seeking to further marginalize and limit access to books that critically discuss race, gender, sexuality and other social topics. Through our partnership we affirm our commitment to diversity and free speech.
“Ultimately, our participation in BBW is part of our advocacy for intellectual freedom and intellectual discovery, and helps develop strong diverse communities that represent our society. King Library has a broad mission to serve the San José and SJSU community. We welcome all in our community and as such are firmly committed to intellectual freedom, diverse perspectives, civic discourse, and strongly oppose censorship.”
Banned Books Week faculty include:
Daniel Lanza
Associate Professor of American Studies and Literature
Why is it important to you to participate in Banned Books Week?
Daniel Rivers
It’s important to me, as a member of the LGBTQ Comics panel, because LGBTQ representation remains a legal and social battleground. Our current moment of broadening LGBTQ representation in comics, TV, young adult fiction, etc., is still very young. If you talk to millennial and Gen X queer folks, we all still remember reading entire comics arcs (or watching entire TV shows) just because there was some side character who was queer-coded. Even when that character hardly had a romance, or died in some insulting way, we were still hungry for that sliver of representation. The fact that queer stories are being targeted so vehemently, and with such coordination, is a reflection of the power these stories have to make our lives feel possible. And I think folks are banning our books because our civic freedoms (try to) prevent them from banning our self-determination. If they can’t stop us from living our lives, they will at least try to make our stories and our histories invisible
What do you hope SJSU students and community members learn from your event(s)?
I hope that people are able to better understand this very new, very young moment in queer representation. And I hope they’re exposed to the ways that queer comics can circumvent some of the pitfalls of representation that come along with TV shows and movies that are created by large studios who are more invested in market share than they are in authentic or creative storytelling. Because they’re subcultural, queer comics offer glimpses of life that are closer to what queer and trans folks experience in our day to day — even when they’re dressed up with monsters and superheroes and the like.
Do you have a favorite book that is currently banned or has been in the past? If so, what is it? What do you like about it?
It’s hard to say what my favorite would be — so many of the queer and trans books that I love get banned — but maybe the
“Deadendia” series by Hamish Steele. It’s also a Netflix series, but the comic itself has a lot of world building and character nuance that gets left out of the show. It’s also been able to pick up the thread of the story after the Netflix show got canceled, so that fans get the ending they deserve. Wouldn’t it be great if all of our favorite canceled shows got finished as comics? In terms of representation, I love the ways that “Deadendia” uses the tropes of horror to tell a found-family story that is inclusive of trans, queer, and neurodiverse identities. It’s also genuinely funny, which is a total plus.
Maite Urcaregui
Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Why is it important to you to participate in Banned Books Week?
Maite Urcaregui
When I teach queer literature, which is all the time, it’s not uncommon to hear from my students that it’s the first time they’ve read queer literature in the classroom. I know how powerful that can be because I also first encountered queer literature in a college classroom and it allowed me to encounter myself as a queer bisexual woman as well. In our “Be Gay, Do Comics” roundtable, we recognize that the majority of book bans and censorship disproportionately target LGBTQ+ stories, and that means that their stories, our stories, are less likely to get told, read and discussed in classrooms. As Professor Rivers so elegantly points out, that not only infringes on our civic freedoms but also our ability to see ourselves and to be ourselves, to imagine ourselves and our world as queer.
What do you hope SJSU students and community members learn from your event(s)?
I hope that SJSU students and community members leave with some book recommendations (and a free book) to read, pass on, and share with a loved one. I hope they also takeaway not only the struggles of fighting book bans but also the joys and pleasures of reading queer literature of all kinds.
Do you have a favorite book that is currently banned or has been in the past? If so, what is it? What do you like about it?
My most beloved book is Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic.” It’s the book I reference above when I say I first encountered queer literature and myself as queer in a college classroom. As Bechdel says in that book, “It was a revelation not of the flesh, but of the mind.” “Fun Home” is a coming-of-age, coming out, coming into being an artist graphic memoir that explores the author’s lesbian identity alongside her father’s death and own complicated queerness. In it, the author/artist really finds herself and her sexuality through literature, especially queer literature, and that’s something I really relate to and appreciate.
Carmen Estela Kennedy Saleh
African American Studies Lecturer
Why is it important to you to participate in Banned Books Week?
It’s important to participate in Banned Books Week, especially as we see in this current climate of conservatism the push to arbitrarily remove books from school libraries and curriculum from classrooms. This type of censorship is a slippery slope that historical precedents show will lead to the loss of other freedoms.
Do you have a favorite book that is currently banned or has been in the past? If so, what is it? What do you like about it?
It’s difficult for me to pinpoint a book that captures everything subversive, or for the sake of this topic, all that could become the target of a ban. In fact, I would say that the question of “one favorite” does not jibe with our activism which is focused on the preservation and platforming of broader narratives. So, it’s not one book but the stewardship of our history, culture, and ideas in books, full stop, which includes what I might not read.
Keenan Norris
Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing
What do you hope SJSU students and community members learn from your event(s)?
I hope that the SJSU community learns about the extent and the seriousness of the recent book bans and how they are specifically connected to our legacies of imperialism and racism. I hope they also learn something about the publication journeys of marginalized authors.
Do you have a favorite book that is currently banned or has been in the past? If so, what is it? What do you like about it?
Kim Brillante Knight
Associate Professor of Digital Humanities
Brook McClurg
Assistant Professor of English
Why is it important to you to participate in Banned Books Week?
People tend to think of book banning as something that happened in the past. However, recent events suggest that practices of book banning and language censorship are on the rise as part of coordinated efforts to suppress representation of vulnerable groups. It is more urgent than ever to protect access to diverse and challenging reading material.
What do you hope SJSU students and community members learn from your event(s)?
We hope that participants are able to visualize and express themselves on the page, to create something tangible that reflects their lived experience, and to create art outside of typical notions of productivity and marketplace value.
Do you have a favorite book that is currently banned or has been in the past? If so, what is it? What do you like about it?
KBK: “Beloved” by Toni Morrison. This work by Morrison is a gut-wrenching read, but its power lies in recognizing how the specters of slavery haunt not only the characters, but our nation. We can’t hide from history.
BM: “The Glass Castle” by Jeanette Walls. I chose this work because I think the story of an individual life and individual families matter. Once we start banning the memoir of any one person or experience it begins to suggest that some lives are worth more than others.
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