I fig­ured it was only a mat­ter of time before I became a banned author, giv­en that How to Build a Human is about the touchy sub­ject of human evo­lu­tion. Nev­er in my wildest dreams did I imag­ine that I would get banned for Hachiko: The True Sto­ry of a Loy­al Dog. 

Duval Coun­ty Pub­lic Schools is one of the largest school dis­tricts in Flori­da, and 70% of their kids are minori­ties. To improve the diver­si­ty of their book col­lec­tion, they pur­chased books from an “Essen­tial Voic­es” col­lec­tion of 170+ titles, one of which was Hachiko. The books in the col­lec­tion are large­ly about peo­ple of col­or and LGQTQ+ top­ics. Duval Coun­ty has been tar­get­ed by the Orwellian-named group “Moms for Lib­er­ty,” and appar­ent­ly to head off any con­tro­ver­sies involv­ing the “Essen­tial Voic­es” books, the dis­trict admin­is­tra­tion pulled all the books off the shelves. Offi­cial­ly the books have been pulled for “review,” appar­ent­ly short­hand for “indef­i­nite pur­ga­to­ry so the Moms for Lib­er­ty won’t scream at us.”

Luck­i­ly, and We Need Diverse Books are help­ing us fight back. They orga­nized an open let­ter to the school board from authors, and three banned authors, includ­ing New­bery Medal win­ner Lin­da Sue Park, spoke at the Decem­ber 6th Duval Coun­ty Pub­lic Schools board meet­ing. Check out a local news report, as well as the full list of banned books.