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Dear Sen. Ted Cruz, Please Ban My Diversity Book
You don’t need to use it as a prop in a Senate hearing, but…that will work
Children’s book authors are now on the canceling chopping block. Recently, my middle-grade biography, They Lost Their Heads: What Happened to Washington’s Teeth, Einstein’s Brain, and Other Famous Body Parts, was banned in a library in Florida.
I still don’t know why.
I have written far more controversial books. Why that book? It doesn’t address diversity or gender. It’s a humorous history book about what happened to famous people’s bodies after they died — Einstein’s brain, Elvis’s wart, Galileo’s finger, etc.
Is death now banned too? Good luck winning that battle. My money is on death.
But I am hardly the only author silenced by parents wielding too much political clout. Book banning is the new TikTok dance du jour. In 2021, The American Library Association received 729 book challenges, compared to only 156 challenges received in 2020.
To be clear, librarians rarely ban books. But parents do.
Now, one power-hungry parent can sit in their bathtub like some misanthropic Marat and put any author on the execution list. Well, my wannabe Jacobins, let’s remember how that ended for the…
