Michael hasnt been challenged, fingers crossed but one thing i should say, its about the three characters that customize their car, it gets customized by outer space and it is written in spanglish and i noticed on good reads weve gotten comments from teachers very irate that the spanish isnt correct. So one of the things that theyre saying in effect is that we dont want the spanish spoken that we live to kids, they want sort of a perfected, not stylized but almost strict spanish almost. And its interesting because where we are connecting, where the book is super popular is texas, california, the southwest, right where spanglish exists so in the spanish people , some people read it and if you dont know what spanglish is then it doesnt make sense to you so , but i wanted to bring that up because theres also a lot of passive censorship, not passive but almost unknown censorship. Librarians just choosing not to buy books and thats another thing i will notice if im at assigning and its say a whole lot of librarians from oregon. Many times the librarians that will come to mind by my book will say i have latino kids but they wont necessarily see if somebody has an allwhite classroom and i think they should read this book so there can be a lot of censorship before it even gets to the shelf. For me , my experience is that i drew this book with my friend and k, americus about censorship. Its about this kid in the small town of oklahoma and he is, his town kind of sucks and the only thing he has is reading because it helps them escape from this small town and one of the books series that he loves is challenged by a mother in the community so its sort of just like an entry way for people to Start Talking about band books and how to fight censorship and how to stand up for things that you love. But i also have a story about censorship that i was involved in censorship when i was in high school because i went to school overseas, i was in kuwait for most of high school and it was an American School but the kuwait government still was in charge of what was approved and what could be bought because it was a Muslim Country and how they would do that though is they would give High School Students the new books we get at the end of the year and give us all sharpies and they would give us a list of things we would have to blackout. But the thing is, when you give that to students that are High Schoolers that are sort of wise asses. We were supposed to cross out instances of the holocaust and also persia , the word persia but my friends and i would just blackout all the words around that word that word was just sticking out. I hate to admit i was part of censorship but i was really bad at it so thats my bad censorship story. A lot of what i do at the comic Book Legal Defense Fund is working about like kids like the kids in americus who are affected by Library Professionals who are affected by censorship. The teacher will call us up and say i have this problem, how can you help . So we will counsel behindthescenes, create resources for those folks to help them deal with the process and fight the challenges and that brings us to a point that i think is lost in banned books week because we get interested in statistics, we get interested in what books are banned because thats what we want to lead read but behind every one of those there are two stories that are seldom told. The first is that Library Professionals, that librarian or that teacher that got that book because their Community Needs this and they are putting their livelihood on the line to serve their community and get that out there and the second person that we really never hear about is that person in the community that needs access to this material , either because they see themselves in it or because it speaks to a Life Experience that they are going through or it simply opens up a window onto a world they would not otherwise see and when we get into dealing with young kids, youre thinking that if there is something wrong with me that that you are taking this book away , a lot of my experiences interacting with those people and trying to say theres nothing wrong with you. Youre okay if you need to have a conversation about things that are upsetting of people about this book so we can land on the same page that we all have the right to choose. Anybody else have anything additional to add to that . This theme of this years fan book is first books. And so the question i would put to you all is why arent more books by women, people of color, transgender, bisexual individuals and books in those communities proportionately challenged and banned . Id like to give a little bit more context to that candy that according to the ala office of intellectual freedom, more than half of all banned books are by authors of color or contain events surrounding diverse communities. Of the graphic novels that have been on the American Library associations list of most frequently banned and challenged, there were 10 of those books , six featured a female central character and four were cocreated by a woman so this isnt just fact, the statistics show there is a disproportionate emphasis on diverse content in band and challenged. There was actually a panel called library yesterday that was specifically about banned books and diversity in banned books and something all of the panelists agree on is that it really is about out of peoples comfort zone and if it isnt that in that comfort zone, that bubble you live in, its a lot easier for you to not read persepolis because you might empathize with a muslim or an iranian family and what they went through and how their lives are if you dont create that empathy, you can paint them as the villain and not understand them so thats what a lot of that is is not trying to understand what someone is so you can villain ice them. I think another thing thats interesting thats going on and corey can probably talk about this is we now have social media and thats given a huge amount of voices a way to test themselves and a way to comment in a way that didnt exist before and where ive noticed that especially is in the world of Childrens Books and in the world of comics and if you think of it as a very closed society , for example Childrens Books was mostly white women publishers, white women librarians and people that like Childrens Books and if you look at comics, it was white guys that were fanatics about comics and for both of them i think its really important to also realize these are fantasy world. Its a place that people kind of escape to so they suddenly have voices outside of their group saying wait a second, like in comics you have to have women and you cant draw women that are always just. [bleep]. They have to be thinking and stuff. I bring that up because theres been in gaming, the gaming world we are seeing that. Theres been horrible backlash. You should be able to have a discussion like we are having without Death Threats or having people feel like they cant ever go online again and they have to wipe out their twitter account or something. So that was making me think, why is this so vicious . It makes me think theres a connection, its a fantasy world thats kind of like the den you retire to where you dont have to think about politics, you dont have to think about these things and now suddenly theres other people at the table that say we are here to and we have a voice. Im rather american and the other thing i want to bring to this discussion is that the censorship starts the minute you write a book and you try to get it published , to sign an agent, to find an editor. The kinds of comments you get , when i was sending low riders out i got people who were like, great story, to art , to marginal an audience. Thats me saying in my cover letter that by 2050 third of the country is going to be english spanish speaking. This was sending it to top agents that represent graphic novels. That that wasnt in their marketing scheme. And i think that you know, now its moved into that both, like publishers and agents, its not just that we dont have enough diverse books, its that we dont have enough diverse publishers, diverse agents and diverse reviewers that understand what they are reading and know how to address that. Id like to add something to this too. Last month that mike county Library Program there were a group of diverse women and they talked about the publishing issues and how hard it was to get and they added a different thing, the publisher chooses what the picture is on the front of the book. And a number of them had , the publisher sort of whitewashed what the book was really about and would have a picture that had nothing to do with the book and one of them at least refused , went to get another publisher as a result. Some of them felt they really wanted this book to be published so much and if people read it they would know so they were somewhat intimidated about it. Its a very big problem. I think we are circling around the idea that this is multifactorial. Publishers are not objecting to people of color on covers of books or people of color because they are implicitly racist. Its because they have this unfounded superstitious belief that this will not succeed in the market and maybe a nonsuperstitious belief that buyers from the fairly small number of significant chains and other acquirers for trade books will not buy the book , so its not a big order. That may be true. They may be successfully assessing what it is that the five or six big accounts for those five big publishers , how they deal with books. And what their superstitions are or what their beliefs are. So thats definitely one factor because without breakout books that have people of color on the cover, its hard to deal with the superstition that you cant sell books out of person of color on the cover and its a vicious cycle. Then theres this dimension of empathy which is well said. That often times , these narratives of marginalized people are narratives about what it feels like to be on the other side of a bunch of interactions that are in mainstream fiction presented as really wonderful. The canonical example was a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court where a woman called the wind done gone which retold gone with the wind from the point of view of Margaret Mitchells slaves and enslaved people instead of the people who enslaved them. As you might imagine, gone with the wind is a really different story from the perspective of the people who are enslaved to the extent that fictions trick is to make you empathize with inconsequential, imaginary people who never lived and never made any difference, you have bought into the consequent reality of these imaginary humans. Then you find out that having gone through it all and having spent years thinking about them, identifying and relying on their strength and all the rest of it that they are horrible people, at least in the perspective of some of the other people in the story and its hard not to feel like how is he making me empathize with these other people . Then a certain amount of it is just rate races and and homophobia. The reason why people dont want my , johnny has two mommies or whatever that book is about, heather has two mommies. Its because their homophobes. That part is easy. Sometimes books by people of color and Diverse People are censored because they are homophobes and racists and stuff will object to it and the other piece of that is that these are people who have craftier lives than the people they normally feature infection are not as upbeat and when were talking about kids books, narratives about people who are generally happy but living in shady circumstances, whether thats anne frank or contemporary narratives about people growing up in very racially divided america with Police Shootings , those peoples stories , i dont want people to read my stories that are sad, is disturbing, downbeat, whatever so thats not a totally illegitimate thing to say. I wanted to as a parent when my kid understands stuff that might bring them brief but its also a certain point beyond which its like well, they are 14 now. When are you going to introduce them to the fact that not everything is perfect outside of your allwhite silver. All those factors swirled together to create this perfect Dumpster Fire of mass censorship of books by marginalized people. I think another part of this is you get to corey that censorship is about control, largely and its about exerting a sense of control, particularly in circumstances that are swirling around that are not something you can oppose. If you are talking about your kid that is exiting childhood and answering adolescence , theres all these factors of loss of control that are happening in your life at that moment. Are you really upset that your kid is reading a john green book that has issues about teen sexuality . Are you upset that their reading this months summer which addresses miscarriage and teen pregnancy . Are you upset theyre about to enter a phase in life where those are real consequences and maybe youre not ready to have that conversation. When you drill down, a lot of censorship begins with concern. These really arent bad people usually. Yes, youve got the homophobes and racists but largely youve got people that are worried about their kids and are just entering into the conversation from the wrong starting point that if the value that you instill in your kids as they were growing up are durable, your kids are going to be able to parse this fine and part of the job of parenting and part of the job of teaching is having an open door to have a conversation about the media they are engaging with goahead class among other things i wanted to say as a librarian, i laugh when i talk to kids because they say just because you read this book about suicide , it doesnt mean im going to see you all lined up on the hawthorne bridge jumping off like lemmings. And its equally as likely that you might down the road have a friend call you late at night and be really depressed and because you read this book, you are going to be sensitive and know what to say. Its easy for people to make that jump that if you read this, you will do it. And in actuality, books that probably our most productive that way is the bible, right . In terms of books that make people act and do things, its probably religious texts. Join a group, give money. Start a war. [laughter] i remember you once floated the idea that maybe parents are so freaked out by the idea of what their kids are reading because its literally the only part of what they get assigned in school that parents can influence. They have testing in common core, and also like where your kids arent allowed to walk around in the street on their own because of stranger danger and when its not stranger danger is because of the danger your kids present to everybody else. Thats really like the only time you get to say i really think my kids should be learning is about what book they should be reading and its also something a lot of people feel qualified to comment on. I think Everybody Knows when you talk about , i think of nine different ways my kid is being made to learn to solve a fraction are nonsense. Theres only one way to solve a fraction, i learned in 1975 and its good enough or me. Everyone agrees they sound like an idiot when they say that because they had solved the fraction in a long time but lots of people qualified to discuss what makes a good book. As i discovered to my great dismay as an author. I think thats right. It does come down to so much of the world is beyond what you are capable of influencing and books a lot of times come down to the values that we hold close. Thats why they hit a nerve. Art has power. Its why people try to suppress part but the more productive conversation is to really engage with it. It is a marketplace of ideas and there are bad ideas. Theres a lot of bad ideas but if the answer to those bad ideas is to say we dont want to allow that in the community and therefore amplified 50 fold or is it going to go no, theres a crappy idea and heres a better alternative. Many people assume that most of the challenges to materials are done by , are conservative reactions to books and other materials they disapprove of. Is that accurate . This is a question that i wanted to bring up because we live in a very liberal city, portland but as a librarian, anecdotally ive heard and read that a lot of the challenges are coming from leftwing liberal people and i can name to that ive heard of from School Librarians so one was , theres a book, an alphabet book that has military equipment and its abc but it can send guns and things like that. That was challenged at our library here because of the violence and the hate. And then a School Librarian told me that hes received multiple complaints from his parents about the comic book bone for being racist and how he described it is the main character is white and the other characters are of color. I dont know if that was just based on the colors or if theres of a white colonialist team because i havent read bone but i wanted to bring those up because i think its easy when i talk to liberals to kind of laugh and go ha, they wanted to then harry potter because of the magic but its a little different when you start hitting home two things that you agree with. And you know, i think thats important to Pay Attention to and its also a little different depending on the context. For example, in the library we believe a lot of things should be available. Its not because we are pushing them or because we have an agenda. Its because we buy books based , the Public Library buys books based on the population it serves. And just a quick thing to go through, usually a big library, any good library to have a selection policy which says why you buy what you buy because nobody ever has enough money to buy everything. But then if a book is challenged, its not one persons buying the book and its not one person defending the book. You have a statement that you turn to that says this is why we have say, gay and lesbian books because we have a gay and lesbian population that gives us tax money and if you dont like this book, theres probably a book that you will like. So its not that every book appeals to everyone but that there are some books that appeal to ever