The cascading consequences of the terror campaign against children's literature
Samira Ahmed became an author of children’s and young adult literature at age 40 after a career as a high school English teacher and worker in education nonprofits like one that sued Governor George Pataki of New York to fight school inequality. She is the author of nine books. Her first, Love, Hate, and Other Filters (2018), is about a young Indian-American girl whom a domestic terrorism incident based on the Oklahoma City bombing impacts her in ways she couldn’t have expected. Her next, Internment, made the New York Times bestseller list. She also wrote a comic book starring Ms. Marvel, the first South Asian Muslim superhero. So why does she have to check into hotels under an assumed name?
At dinner during our shared residency last month at the artist’s colony Ragdale, she told me things about what’s happening in her industry so shocking I’m surprised I didn’t drop my plate in the buffet line. Yesterday, she shared the story more fully. Here is an edited transcript of our jaw-dropping conversation.
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A little birdie recently told me, “Children’s publishing is a shit show right now.”
There are many things happening in children’s publishing right now. Number one, the market is contracting for both young adult and middle grades—which is not necessarily something you can control.
But the part that really scared me is the role of book bans. You said it could kill children’s publishing.
Yes. This really began in earnest with the attacks on “critical race theory”: attacks on anything Black or brown in schools, anything talking about race, anything in history that was going to make white kids feel bad. '“CRT” morphed into something much broader. In the last five-ish years, both the American Library Association and the University of Pennsylvania showed that there's been roughly 25,000 so-called “banning incidents,” where mostly parents, and—actually, I shouldn’t just say '“mostly parents. It’s also adults in the community—
Activists.
There was, I can’t remember his name, but for a while, before they passed some other laws, there were, I think, six people responsible for 80% of the book bans, and one of them was this guy from New York City who had moved to Florida, you know, no kids, doesn’t have a dog in the fight of public schools at all, except he’s paying taxes. He was responsible for a huge percentage. [Bruce Friedman, who calls himself the “Michael Jordan of book banning.”] Another mom, her kid was homeschooled.
Activist groups basically created a turnkey operation where you can just fill out forms, right?
Yes, and that is largely because of Moms for Liberty. (They’re the worst named organization!)
Supposedly grassroots, but actually run from the top down by the wife of one of the most powerful Republicans in Florida.
Yes. People can go to their public school websites and download documents that are about filing complaints about books. And there are websites that have excerpts from books for young adults or middle grades, or even for picture books, that they can just pull, and copy-paste a quote, completely out of context, and say, “Look, this is a pedophile trying to get into our schools.” Or, “Look at this racism towards white people.” Or, “Look, this is antisemitic.” You know, whatever the case may be.
So, your books have been banned in forty states.
Yeah, they’ve been banned in a wide variety of states. There’s two kinds of bans. Formal bands are where a person files a complaint: a document that has the name of the book, the author, and then an excerpt for why it should be banned. All of those documents will ask, “Have you read this book?” Everyone says “yes.” (They haven’t read those books, I guarantee you.)
The other is this “soft banning,” which in so many ways is more insidious. It’s very hard to capture. Part of the reason I know that my books have been soft-banned is because I’m out there talking about book bans a lot, and teachers and librarians will DM me, or email me—on the down-low—and share information about my books being pulled without formal process. This is people complying in advance—pulling books even though they haven’t been asked to pull them.
The first time I heard that was about five years ago, after Internment came out. I was talking at a conference of English teachers and one of them pulled me aside. She was a high school teacher in a very small district in a red state. She wanted to bring Internment into her classroom for literary circles—basically, like, mini-book clubs in classrooms: a group of kids read a book together, they journal about it, they have small-group discussions, then they go back to the class. There’s a list of books, and they can choose. There’s probably like thirty, forty books on that list.
Now, she is in a state that doesn’t have union protection. A right-to-work state, and she was the least senior in the department, and also a single mom. She said to me, “These two teachers raised an objection.” It had never crossed her mind that anyone could object to the book. She said that one of them said, “We don’t think that kind of book belongs in our school.” When she asked why, the answer was that there are no Muslim or South Asian kids in our school.
And she said to me, “I figured out what they were actually saying, but I was afraid to push back, because, frankly, I was scared to lose my job. I feel bad about it. So my question to you, Samira, is how can I be brave?” That question: it’s a gut-punch for a teacher to ask when all she’s trying to do is give kids a book. It’s not even that she is compelling them to read it. It was a book that kids could choose.
That question—“How can I be brave?”—eventually became the inspiration for my book This Book Won’t Burn, which is about kids fighting book bans.
Tell me about your trip to Niles, Michigan.
Niles, Michigan, which is only about an hour away from Chicago, is a district that got a grant from We Need Diverse Books, an organization that is about ten years old that has been trying to help diversify children’s literature. They were able to get a few hundred books for free from the school that the librarians and English teachers selected. I mean, how amazing that you get a bunch of free books in your district?
Well, the school board was really upset about some of the books. Half were picture books. And they were also mad about two of my books. One was Internment, which is about Muslims put in interment camps, and Hollow Fires, a book that’s contemporary, but loosely based on the Leopold and Loeb murders. So, a teacher in that district asked me and two other authors to speak at the school board meeting about why book bans are dangerous and why it was so wrong for the school board to stop these books from being out on the shelves that teachers and librarians, the professionals that they’ve hired in their district to create book collections, have decided are appropriate for high school kids or middle school kids, or, in the case of picture books, elementary school kids.
So I went to the absolutely packed school board meeting. The school board members were sitting at a table in front of us. There had been a recent changeover on the board. It had shifted much more to the right, in part because this tiny town had an influx of national money from Moms for Liberty to help fund a candidate. That candidate became president of the school board.
A Moms for Liberty member actually came up to speak at that board meeting. I spoke, two other authors spoke, one who actually went to that school district, whose book was being banned. She graduated from that district! So she sent in a Zoom message about how she could never have believed her middle-grade book was being banned at the school. It was a very powerful evening. One of the most amazing speakers was a young woman, a senior at the high school. She was, “What is this? I should not have to be here, on a school night, telling you, the school board, to allow me to read books.”
And it was dead silent.
Not one of these school board members—not one—looked up at her. They could not face her. They clearly knew what they were doing was wrong. They were being shamed by an obviously well-read young woman who was saying, like, “Do your job. You’re supposed to be making access to books easier for students like me. Instead, you’re making it harder.”
And of course the vast majority of the books they didn’t want on the shelves were by either Black authors, brown authors, queer authors, trans authors.
Niles, Michigan, in that moment, exemplifies what we are seeing in districts around the country. We’re seeing incredible hostility at some of these school board meetings. There were teachers standing up, weeping. Because, in this tiny town, where you all know each other, they’re all going to the same grocery store where they’ve been seeing each other for years. Some of them probably went to high school together and are still living in the town. They just know each other.
So this was “outsider agitators” destroying trust within their community.
Mothers for Liberty funding damaged the community so much. They’ve turned neighbor against neighbor. One of the reasons the teacher was weeping is because, on the school’s Facebook page, members of the community—people she knows!—are calling her a “pedophile.” And she was, like, “But you know me! I’m a teacher because I love your kids! And I love being a teacher! and you’re saying that I’m a ‘pedophile’ because I want a book by, I don’t know, this Muslim author, in my classroom—or not even my classroom, the library. This gay author. This Black author.”
Tell me the machine gun story.
So, I am on the national board of an organization called Authors Against Book Bans, which has been working in every state, to try to fight these book bans, but also to protect literacy, and protect authors, because one of the things that we’ve been finding is that, increasingly, authors, are, yeah, getting death threats.
These are authors going to speak in communities where they have been invited. I’m often invited into high schools, where they might be teaching my book. And recently, in Colorado, an author who writes middle-grade and picture books was invited—by the community!—to come and speak, and there was an uproar because one of her books supposedly supported “transgenderism” (which is not a word!) because a character did not identify as a boy or a girl, and another one of her picture books is about a woman who fought to wear pants in Mexico a hundred years ago. There was an uproar over a pronoun and a woman wanting to wear pants!
First, they changed her visit. It was supposed to be a middle school. They moved it to the high school because it was older kids, even though that’s not who she’s writing for. There were, I think, half a dozen articles about her in the local paper. There were letters to the editor about her presence there, and how it was going to be harmful for the kids— “harmful for the kids” and “protecting the kids” are phrases that we hear all the fucking time. She was very nervous, because she was getting threats. She had heard that other local people were getting threats. They kept having to shift the place where she was going to speak. And, she was also doing an open community event where people could come, a dinner, like, not on school property. A guy showed up with a very big gun and an upside down American flag in protest. It was either an AK-47 or an AR-15.
Colorado is an open carry state. The author is not from an open-carry state. I’m not from an open-carry state. If I see someone standing there, protesting me outside my venue with a giant gun, I’m gonna be completely freaked out, and rightfully so. And the superintendent then told her that he had gotten bomb threats on his house. Now, this is a small area, everywhere knows where the superintendent lives.
You said you’ve taken precautions when you check into hotels.
I head up a lot of the security and safety talks at Authors Against Book Bans. When my first book came out, I was starting to get a lot of rape and death threats. If you’re a woman on the Internet you get death and rape threats, probably regularly, which is really fucked up, by the way. But I started getting more in 2019, when Internment was being published.
I was going to an event in New York City at Books of Wonder, which is a children’s bookstore, and my conversation partner was a Black woman. We both started, separately, getting anonymous threats from people, and right before I was supposed to start my book tour, someone called all the hotels within walking distance of Books of Wonder. This person started calling each hotel and saying, “Is Samira Ahmed staying at your hotel?” Like, asking if they could be connected to Samira Ahmed. One of those hotels happened to be the hotel that I was going to be staying in. The hotel manager called my publicist, because they felt it was kind of strange. So, because of that, and because of other threats that were surrounding it, I have begun checking into hotels under a pseudonym. My publicist has to make these arrangements in advance. That’s still happening.
Do you use a white name?
I use a white name.
Tell me about HR 7661.
HR 7661 is a bill in the House right now, a national book banning bill—even though it’s being called something. like “Protecting Children against Sexual Predators,” or whatever it is. [It’s the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act.”] It passed the House Education Committee, which we did not think would happen. Essentially, this bill says that no place that’s getting public funds—public libraries or public schools—can have books that have sexual content in them.
Now, it doesn’t define what that is. But in the past, where we’ve seen this language, sexual content can mean the existence of a trans character in a book. The mere existence.
A vague law like that is always going to be subject to politically partial application.
And this law, potentially, because of its vagueness, could see authors’ books labeled as pornography. Then, if your book is given to a child, this is where this is going: you are—shilling pornography to a child! And a bookseller selling that book, you can see how they could be labeled as someone who sold pornography to children, which is against the law.
A lot of opportunities for complying in advance.
Oh, completely.
But there is at least one thing that’s specific in the law, right?
Yeah, the bill even has the phrase, I’m not kidding, that there can’t be any books with, quote, “lewd dancing.” Which, I mean, I’m like: Kevin Bacon, this is your time.
This bill is extremely dangerous, because, given its vagueness, it could have the ability to essentially destroy the publishing of children’s literature.
You said that, already, two publishing imprints have gone out of business.
Yeah, so two imprints have recently closed down. That means that, even though some of their books were absorbed by other imprints within their larger publishing houses,there were editors being laid off—so there are going to be fewer children’s books published, because that’s just how that works.
You’ve mentioned that since children’s books cost less, and royalties are calculated based on a percentage of the cover price, those authors earn less than authors for adults, so going on tours is an important part of how people make a living.
Yes. The biggest part of that is school visits, especially for picture book authors and middle-grade authors. I have been able to do school visits, too. They’re really a joy, and a way to essentially supplement your income. But one of the things that we’ve seen, especially for queer authors, Black authors, indigenous authors, and brown authors, is that school visits are dwindling because school districts are scared. They are complying in advance.
None of us are, like, writing manuals: “This is how you become queer,” “This is how I’m going to convert you to Islam”; they’re making it seem like we’re grooming kids into these things when merely existing is enough. They normally would get twelve to fifteen school visits a year. That might be $40,000, $35,000, and now they’re down to zero. You are now taking a massive hit. Going to zero in one year, as you can imagine, is quite painful. In the Justice Department litigation to prevent Penguin Random House from buying Simon & Schuster, in the trial transcript you can read how between 80% and 90% of authors cannot make a living solely based on publishing their books.
So basically you have something built into the labor model, part of the infrastructure—a reason many children’s books even exist.
Right. School districts and local community-based nonprofits have line items in their budgets to bring in authors like me.
It’s not just that we aren’t being invited. We’re signing the contracts and still getting cancelled. Let me give you some specifics. It was just so egregious. I was invited to speak at a New York City private school.
Not, say, Mississippi.
Not Mississippi. New York City. Upper East Side. Private school. I was told that some of the students had requested me to come and speak to the school. I had a contract. That morning, I got a call from my booking agent and was told, “they have canceled today’s visit.” They would not tell us why. Now, of course, in the contract, there’s force majeure and clauses like that. but if you cancel, you have to pay, if it doesn’t have any of those reasons behind it. Now, usually, school districts don’t want to pay for that.
Also, I’m very flexible. “Hey, there’s a snowstorm.” “Oh, the power went out.” Of course we’re going to cancel. We’re going to reschedule. I’m a former teacher. I know. But they would not tell us the reason. We don’t know why. Why are you not wanting to reschedule? What, exactly, is happening?
“We won’t put it in writing,” the guy we were dealing with at the school literally said. “If you call me, I will tell you.”
And, I’m not a lawyer, but: No. That’s ridiculous.
And then, another author went to that school, had done her visit, and emailed them saying, “I saw how you treated my colleague and friend Samira, and I was really distressed, because this is absurd. Why have you canceled her visit?” And they said the same thing: “You can call us and we’ll tell you.” Finally, after some hedging, one of the people at the school told her in writing that they were afraid Samria’s visit would create a safety issue for our school and our kids.
Now this is the kicker: my visit was on Zoom. My presence on a Zoom was creating a safety issue for the kids at this fancy Upper East Side school in Manhattan.
I don’t know what they were going to catch from me. Like, my Muslim germs? I don’t know what was happening, but, yeah, it was astonishing. And actually, I went on my Instagram. I did a post about it because I was so mad. I did not mention the name of the school. I did not mention any names. And then I got a very angry letter from the school saying, “Well, you did not ask us permission to put that post up on your Instagram.”
What about this Supreme Court case about parents being able to opt out of their children’s presence in class?
Yeah, so Mahmoud v. Taylor was a case that came before the Supreme Court over the last year. This was a situation where some groups of parents, religious parents, objected to find picture books in the classroom. They didn’t want their kids to be present while they were being taught. I mean, it’s just part of the classroom. You don’t get to opt out of human beings existing in the world. Like if the teacher is gay, are you going to be like, “Well, my kid can’t go into that classroom”?
They tried that in California in 1978.
Oh, yes, well, I’m sure they will try it again.
So, anyway, there were these five picture books. The Supreme Court found in favor of the parents. This is another one of those cases which is going to create this issue of complying in advance, because that school district, and many others like it, will not want the hassle. A superintendent doesn’t want ten parents in his office, calling him, whatever.
Now, what was especially so egregious about this case was that, during the arguments [laughs], Justice Alito was referencing this book called Pride Puppy. Yes, it’s about a puppy that goes to a pride parade! There’s, like, floats, there’s people in costumes, there’s families at a pride parade—because, if you’ve been to a pride parade, you know it’s all-ages! It’s for everyone! Poor little puppy’s lost, but he’s having fun with this pride parade, and there is someone wearing a leather jacket! And Alito said that this represented some kind of bondage thing, an S&M thing, that isn’t appropriate for picture books. It is a person wearing a leather jacket! I’m like, did you ever watch Happy Days!?
Let’s conclude with some big-picture questions. What do you want historians seventy-five years from now to know about what’s happening now? What are they trying to do, in your judgement?
Oh, I think what they’re trying to do is really clear, which is: it’s Project 2025. This banning is written into that. That’s exactly what they want, and they are achieving it. They want to ban books. They want to erase identities. They want to take America back [laughs] to an age where brown and black people and queer people and trans people, and anyone from any marginalized group, will just sit in the back of the bus and be quiet. They don't want to be subject to the world in which they actually live—i.e., themselves—to feel bad about things. For example, a teacher in Texas was fired!—sorry, I’m getting a little hyped up right now—for teaching the graphic novel of The Diary of Anne Frank!
[Long, incredulous pause.]
Because it’s gonna make Christian kids feel bad?
They don’t want to feel bad for anything that’s happened in history. Reading a book about an enslaved person. Reading a book about the Holocaust. I don’t even know how you teach World War II! How do you teach that without talking about the Holocaust? It is unfathomable to me.
And the thing that’s so insidious about it is that its tentacles are going everywhere. Like, recently, the Holocaust Museum—the Holocaust Museum!—removed references to how we should see things like racism and antisemitism on a spectrum, that they are related.
I think the reason I pulled out the figure of seventy-five years is that I’ve been haunted by reading a new collection of the essays by a wonderful historian of residential segregation, the late Arnold Hirsch, and one of them is about a riot, then months of terrorism, against a single Black family that moved into an all-white housing project in Chicago in the early 1950s. In a personal essay, Hirsch writes about how shocked he was as a graduate student to read a report about that in an archive. He couldn’t quite believe it happened, because, growing up in Chicago, he had never heard of anything like this. That was because, he later learned, there was a gentleman’s agreement between the city and the city’s newspapers not to cover such incidents, of which there were many. Likewise, I’m haunted now that even someone like me, who covers stuff like this professionally, didn’t know about this virtual terror campaign against children’s book authors. Is this another case where agenda-setting elite political journalism has been inadequate to the basic task of informing the public about what is going on in front of our eyes?
There has been some coverage, mostly in local areas. Like Niles, Michigan has a tiny little newspaper, and it got a little bit of coverage there. Because, like, 200 people showing up at a school board meeting is newsworthy in a tiny town. But we’re barely getting national coverage on this. I mean, Mahmoud v. Taylor, it’s a Supreme Court case; it got some. But what we’re not seeing is how authors are being attacked. How we are unsafe, just talking about books.
And no coverage of the business consequences.
Which are that, number one, when your books are banned all the time, publishing, which is a cautious industry—and even though they won’t tell you this—is less likely to spend money on getting books by you, or marketing books by those authors who are frequently banned. And one of the things we’re seeing right how is, if you look at the New York Times bestseller list for children’s book right now, middle-grade and young adult, you’ll see that, there was this time about eight years ago, between like 2015 and 2020, when we saw a big upswing in books by diverse authors. Now we’re seeing a backlash to that. If you have a breakthrough book, and you’re an author of color, debuts are getting less and less spent on. Virtually everyone in publishing will say [laughs]: “We like Democrats! We voted for Obama!” But it’s a capitalist industry, it’s a cautious industry, and they will go where they see the money.
So, partially because of that lack of coverage, the bad guys are winning. Given that, how’s the resistance movement going?
What I want to say is this: I believe that the vast majority of the public are against book bans. Actually, every survey shows this. The majority of Americans understand that censorship is fucking wrong. But the vast majority of Americans are not engaged on this topic.
For a long time, it was the very, very vocal field of like six adults in Florida banning most of the books. But now they’ve riled up the right-wing activists everywhere. And, you now, there’s a lot of meat on the bone for them. They’re like, “Wow.” They get to go against queer people and Jewish people and Muslim people and Black people all at once. And get these books out of “our” schools. And, “How dare they come in with their socialist agendas?” and, “How dare they come in with pushing their DEI?”
The thing is, books by white authors are also getting banned. Any book that has references to, say, any kind of sexual assault, which, in young adult literature, exists, because, sadly, that’s the fucking world. And any book that potentially could paint, I guess, a white male as a villain.
One thing I really want: I don’t think there’s a good enough understanding in all of publishing about all of this—and I am talking about people who write for adults. If children’s literature continues to be attacked, and we know that the data shows that literacy is down in America, right? We know that the the average adult, if we’re lucky, reads one book a year. I mean, I’m a nerd. That’s not enough! And while you see attacks on literacy, because districts are complying in advance, simultaneously, teachers are also not teaching full books any more. They are teaching excerpts. As a former high school teacher, I am literally getting hives, thinking about kids graduating from high school without having read a whole novel.
They’re eating the seed corn. And, twenty years from now, kids who don’t read books because the authors are getting a ban, they’re going to be more susceptible to authoritarian appeals.
And there will be no adult literature, either! Children’s. Literature. Creates. Adult. Readers.
Preach!
Without kids who have full and unfettered access to books, you will have illiterate adults. I’m begging people to connect these dots! If children’s literature goes down, if all we have left in our schools are, you know, the Dick and Jane books, and, like, occasionally, excerpts from—I’m not even sure. Hemingway is getting banned, and Salinger. The Great Gatsy’s banned! That was one of the books that everybody read in high school! I don’t know what excerpts they’re going to be reading. You know, maybe “To My Dear and Loving Husband,” maybe they’ll read that poem.
And - an ignorant population is easier to control.
