What Happened When The Author Of One Of America’s Most Banned Books Came To My Small-Town Library | by Janice Harayda | Lit Life | Oct, 2025
Last week, the author of America’s second-most-banned book spoke at my small-town library. Before she arrived, the staff asked for a police guard for the event.
As incredible as it sounds, the request made sense. The police knew it and sent a man in blue who stood by during the author’s talk.
For months our library had been drawing fire from advocacy groups like Moms for Liberty in angry public debates. The groups wanted it to move certain books from the children’s or teen section to the adult shelves, and when the staff tried to compromise by moving some but not all of the titles, the state of Alabama defunded it. It could do that because a recent change in state law lets it cut off money for any library that displays material in a way it sees as “inappropriate.” Ours is the first library in the U.S. defunded in a banned-books dispute, and the event made national news.
But something remarkable happened afterward. Patricia McCormick learned from media reports that one of the books that cost our library its state funding was her young adult novel, Sold, a National…
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