Iowa author’s dream denied by book ban

The first time I saw my name in print was in this paper. A fifth-grader at the time, I’d written a letter to the editor because I was upset that some schools were pulling Harry Potter off the shelf due to concerns it was promoting witchcraft. I used the word “depicted” in the letter. I was pretty proud of that.

A few decades later, I published my first novel, “Crushing It,“ with Penguin Random House. It’s an “enemies-to-first-crushes” story about two girls on an eighth-grade soccer team, written for the same age range as the early Harry Potter books. There are no wizards involved, though. (This is fortunate or unfortunate, I guess, depending how you feel about witchcraft.)

While discussing launch plans, I told my publisher I wanted to make sure to visit schools in Iowa. I was lucky to have amazing teachers here who encouraged my writing, but I didn’t have many models for how to pursue a creative career. Being a writer felt like a faraway dream. So I was excited to return to Iowa, connect with local students, and encourage their creativity — something that would have been incredibly meaningful for me at that age.

Unfortunately, as we were in the midst of working with educators and booksellers to set this up, book bans once again reared their heads. Judges lifted the injunction that had blocked the enforcement of Iowa’s book ban, putting the rules broadly prohibiting “instruction relating to gender identity or sexual orientation” through sixth grade back into effect. Figuring out how I would visit middle schools became a logistical nightmare, particularly given the ban’s (intentional?) lack of clarity around many nuances of enforcement. Ultimately, we had to cancel our plans.

For me, this derailed a week of school visits. For educators, this is an everyday issue: working to uphold a ban that’s both sweeping and vague, under intense scrutiny by lawmakers and community members, while trying to protect their students and simply do their jobs.

One of the most frustrating aspects of all this is that there are already safeguards in place to ensure the titles shelved in school are developmentally appropriate. Publishers supply age ranges for their books. Respected trade reviewers like School Library Journal feature age or grade ranges alongside every review. The distributors who sell books to school libraries further assess and categorize titles by age and grade.

Finally, librarians, who literally went to school to do this job, constantly make collection development decisions based on their expertise and their students’ needs. They consider a variety of factors that have been completely left out of this political conversation, including literacy, students’ emotional development and areas of interest, and how to best promote a lifelong love of reading.

Last year, book bans in the U.S. tripled, with Iowa and Florida leading the charge. With the other major houses recently joining Penguin in a renewed complaint against Iowa, I’m hopeful this trend will change.

Of course, I would love to see my book on the shelf at Franklin Middle School, where I was a sixth-grader doodling in my notebook, dreaming of writing a book someday after the rush of publishing a letter in The Gazette the year before. But mostly, I hope to someday be able to visit schools in Iowa, lead a few fun writing exercises with students, and tell them: your stories matter. And you can be a kid from Cedar Rapids and grow up to be whatever you want to be.

Erin Becker is an author from Cedar Rapids. Her first book, Crushing It, was published by Penguin Random House, chosen as a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection and received a star from Shelf Awareness. Join her for a signing at Sidekick Coffee & Books on Sunday or for a reading and conversation at Parlor City with Next Page Books on October 11.