This is the third in a series of interviews with authors whose work has been banned. Carmen Maria Machado is the award-winning author of three books, including the bestselling memoir In the Dream House, the graphic novel The Low, Low Woods, and the collection Her Body and Other Parties, which was named by The New York Times as one of fifteen titles in “The New Vanguard,” a list of “remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st Century.” Machado lives in Philadelphia and in Iowa City, where she spoke to The Little Hawk.

City High students have returned this fall to the news that a federal judge has lifted the injunction against state law SF 496, which led to thousands of books being removed from Iowa public schools last winter, including from ICCSD libraries and classrooms. You are an award-winning and bestselling author whose work has been banned in multiple states. Which of your books have been banned and why? 

I have had challenges on all three of my books: In the Dream House; The Low, Low Woods; and Her Body and Other Parties. The biggest time was with Dream House. When COVID was going on, there was a huge controversy where this school in Leander, Texas, outside of Austin, had this memoir unit in which [In the Dream House] was on a list of books students could choose from to read and write about. I discovered [what was going on] when someone messaged me on Instagram saying, ‘I’m in this district. There was a school board meeting yesterday and somebody was reading passages of your book out loud, and also had a sex toy that they were, like, waving around.’ So it was very weird. I found and watched the video, and at first it was kind of funny because, like, this is obviously really f***** up and stupid. But [as I watched], it was like, ‘This book is grooming our children.’ It got really homophobic, really quickly, and I was like, ‘Okay, it’s not so funny, it’s actually really bad.’ I wrote an op-ed for The New York Times about it. And then Greg Abbott, the Governor of Texas, wrote a letter at some point to the public school districts in Texas, and my book was one of two that were mentioned by name. So [the memoir] is the one, I’d say, that is most frequently banned. However, somebody also banned the graphic novel, The Low, Low Woods, in, I think, Louisiana. And years ago, before this current wave of censorship, there was also this time when an inmate in a women’s prison in, I wanna say Missouri, had requested my book to be in the library, and the correctional department rejected it. 

That sounds like a lot.

Yeah, it’s really weird, because when I was a kid, I was very involved in my local library and local public library. I volunteered there every summer for years and years. And every year, we would have banned book week, and they would make a big display of all the books that had been banned, and I always wanted to read the banned books. I would always make a beeline for the display, because I was like, ‘That’s what I want, is what people are telling me I’m not supposed to be reading.’ But it is really bizarre to become an adult and write books and then have those books [be banned]. It’s actually quite f***** up. I just hate it so much.

Your work is known for its vivid and honest portrayal of queer sexuality and sexual relationships. The Iowa law specifically says that school districts should eliminate books that contain “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act.” Do you think this law is intended to focus on straight sexuality or queer sexuality? Or both? 

I think it’s both, because even if you’re talking about heterosexual relationships, work that portrays sex as positive or neutral is a danger to their bottom line, regardless of whose sexuality it is. I think they like to focus on queer and trans people for obvious reasons that aren’t even worth explaining—yeah, they’re homophobic—but I do think that generally speaking, the kinds of people who are passing these laws, who are advocating for these groups, whatever: they are also just generally very sex-negative. (I would say, specifically homophobic and transphobic.) And I think, if you had a straight character having a sexual awakening, I also don’t think they would really like that, because that would show agency and pleasure, which would be against their philosophy.

We know from reading George Orwell’s 1984 that sex in books can be an anti-government political statement of personal liberty. Do you see your work as political? In what way?

I think there’s a fairly good argument to make that all art is political in some way. This always felt like a very understood thing to me, and yet people do push back against the [idea]. But even something that considers itself apolitical, is political, by the fact that it considers itself, or the author considers it, to be apolitical. And I think that what we commit to the page as authors, what gets bought by publishers, what gets read widely: those are all political questions. 

I do see my work as political, and I don’t mean that in the sense that I sit down and am like, ‘What is my agenda?’ I exist in the world as a Latina, as a fat person, as a queer person, as a woman. And existing in those spaces and asserting my right to make art about what I want, and peoples’ ability to read and access that art, is also obviously very political. But I think that’s true even if the author is not queer, or is white, or whatever. I still think that what comes to readers and how readers access that work is also a political question. So yes, I would say that my work is political, but I would also say that all art is in some way political, even if [some people] think that politics does not exist [in art]. 

Why do you think banning books is so important to conservative lawmakers when they have not banned content that is easily available on phones and computers?

You mean, [why have they not banned online] pornography, or publicly available sexual content? It’s weird, but I think the fact that it’s art makes a difference. I think that if you’re trying to keep a young person’s brain very shut down, [content] coming in via art is actually more powerful than that coming in via other methods. 

I think they mostly just see it as an easier fight. Because it’s easier to say, ‘What about the children?’ and ban a book at a certain school–take it out of a library, you can physically remove it–as opposed to trying to ban, like, sexual content on the internet, which is essentially an impossible task. How would one even do that? So I think for them, it’s an easier battle. And I think they do actually see education as an existential threat. There are ways in which [book banning] becomes a stand-in for other things. 

Why do you think people don’t want teenagers to read about queer sex?

I think some people do believe that just by accessing material about [queer] sex, it could, I dunno, ‘gayify’ a straight person. But that’s not of course what happens. What happens is a person who is new in their sexuality who might access some kind of sexual content, might sort of be like, ‘Oh, am I gay?’ It creates this avenue for them to understand [themselves]. And also, in this case in the context of a piece of art, it’s like you’re reading something and understanding something that’s happening, artistically speaking, and you’re also getting this dose of yourself. Now if you are a bigot who doesn’t want your kid to be gay, I can see how that would translate–if you are very, very stupid–it would translate in your brain, to, like, ‘Oh, my kid read a book and became gay.’ But that’s not what happens; we know that’s not what happens. 

But I do think that again, parents like this, and the politicians who are trying to exploit those parents, they keep a tight rein on their families, and they keep this sort of boundary around their kids. That’s what parents do–they’re trying to instill their kids with their values, etc., and the hard thing is, like, when you are in a public school system, it’s not just your child. It’s other children, other peoples’ children. And I am of the philosophy that if you really want to restrain what your kids are reading to such an extent, then you should [be] homeschooling your kids. And that still sucks–I hate that–but that is your right as a parent. Until that child is 18 and then they can go out into the world and do whatever they want. I don’t have kids, but if I did have kids, I don’t want some other parent at my kids’ school who doesn’t share my values telling kids what they are and aren’t allowed to read, especially when professional educators, like the teachers at these schools, are saying ‘We think this book has some value, or we think that kids having access to this book is important,’ which is their job, not the parents’ job. 

Do these kinds of bans change the way you think about writing?

What an interesting question. . . No, in the sense that, I’m not letting random homophobes and politicians dictate what I write. That isn’t interesting to me. I also recognize that I am not explicitly writing for teenagers, and if I were, and my work were getting censored—I know that it wouldn’t affect me necessarily, but—I can imagine that if you would write books for teens and those books were constantly getting censored, I can imagine how that would kind of mess with your head a little bit and it might get hard to approach your work. I don’t think that’s true for me specifically. Truly, I am such a cantankerous, contrarian person, that I’m just like, ‘If they don’t want me to write about this, then I’ll just write more of it. It’s fine. What are they gonna do about it?’ And I feel very lucky to feel that way. But I could absolutely understand, intellectually, how for somebody it would actually create–at least, weirdness, in their experience of committing something to the page.

I do feel lucky in the sense that, I decided a long time ago the kind of work I wanted to make, and this was long before I was published. When I was in school I made decisions about what kind of artist I wanted to be and what I wanted to [write] and what my voice was going to be. And I feel like I made that decision and stuck to it and have never really had to change that, ever; I just sort of just kept honing my voice more and more. But I could understand–especially if that was where you were focusing your energy, working for children or teens–I could see how that would feel weird. Not because you’d done something wrong, but because censors put voices into your head. Which sucks, and is awful.

How would you describe your experience of being an author whose work has been banned? And living in a red state? 

It makes me really sad–me, in sort of a literal sense, but also [in the sense of what] I kept thinking about especially with this thing that was going on in the Leander School District. I was thinking about the queer kids in those schools. This is what I argued in the op-ed I wrote for The New York Times. I was like ‘You know, my book is about seeing things that are hard to see, and the lessons that I learned about my case, like domestic violence in queer relationships; and so there is something really f***** up about telling teens and queer teens that you don’t want them knowing or learning about this stuff, even indirectly. I think also it’s hard because I know a lot of these bans are framed as ‘protecting the children’ or ‘keeping kids safe.’ But that’s not what keeps kids safe. And also if you scratch all of this rhetoric, right underneath that little surface of keeping kids safe is racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. [It’s] not that subtle. 

And it makes me really sad for the queer kids in these communities, it makes me really sad even for non-queer kids, kids who are learning about people who aren’t like them, you know? And it’s heartbreaking as an artist, and–and I feel weird calling myself this–but as a queer elder. As a person who is, you know, a queer adult, it’s really terrible, because for me, like, one of the weirdest things about coming of age when I did—in high school in the early 2000s—is that I just didn’t see stuff about people like me, so I sort of struggled to understand who I was. In some ways that’s different now because of the internet, obviously. As I’m sure you know, it’s really different being your age and there’s a lot more out queer people. At that age, I knew one girl who was gay, when I was in high school, and she was actually amazing to me, because I was like, ‘Wow, you really know who you are.’ But you know, you just never met other queer people. . . So I think that part of it is they [the people banning books] can see that they’re losing this fight—that queer people are now able to understand themselves earlier in their lives, but they are trying really hard to make that. . . [trails off]. . . There are queer kids in red states. I think also people forget this. Even when you’re in the most conservative place, there are still queer, trans, like, they still exist. And we shouldn’t abandon them, we should be fighting for them, even if we’re coming from places that are more progressive.

What else would you like to add on the subject of book bans in the local schools? 

Young people are so vulnerable. This is something that I think about as a teacher, and as an adult in the world (I’m not a parent, but I’m an aunt.). Kids are so vulnerable. And teachers and people who are trying to make curriculum for young people—to not just learn and grow as thinkers and as people in the world, but to help them also see themselves and understand themselves—they’re the best of us. And they do not get paid enough to do this really good work with young people. And the people who either try to interfere with that work or use other people to interfere with that work as a way of furthering a political agenda are the worst of us. And it feels wild to me that in the year of our lord 2024 that we’re still dealing with this, and this is happening on any kind of state level. It’s wild, it’s deeply upsetting, and I don’t know what’s going to happen.  I wish I could be like, ‘It won’t survive, or it won’t last.’ Ultimately, those books persist, and young people get to grow up and make whatever decisions they want to make about the art that they access and consume. But as somebody who spent my young teenage years not really understanding who I was, it breaks my heart to think that some random politician who’s trying to further this bigger political agenda is going to interfere with young peoples’ abilities to access art. That is terrible, and yet people do it all the time. Obviously we’re in this weird historical moment right now that’s been going on for a while and we’re just in this cultural contraction. . . but it’s terrible. It’s terrible and it feels very discouraging. It’s very heartbreaking. And I feel sad—very, very sad.

This Q&A was originally published in The Little Hawk on September 9, 2024. 

This Q and A with Yaa Gyasi is the final in a series of interviews with authors whose work has been banned.

Yaa Gyasi was born in Mampong, Ghana, and grew up in Alabama, Illinois, and Tennessee. She earned a BA in English from Stanford University and an MFA from Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of the novels Homegoing (2016) and Transcendent Kingdom (2020). Homegoing won the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the American Book Award. Transcendent Kingdom was a finalist for the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Yaa Gyasi won a 2016 National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” Award. She was named a 2017 Granta Best Young American Novelist and received a 2018 Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin. In 2020, she was awarded the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature.

Your first novel, Homegoing, follows two African half-sisters through the generations. One marries a British soldier stationed in Ghana and the other is sold into slavery and transported in a slave ship to the U.S. Readers all over the world responded to Homegoing when it was published  in 2016. Homegoing became an international literary phenomenon, widely taught in high schools and college classes around the US (and the world).

In the New York Times, the Pulitzer Prizewinning author Isabelle Wilkerson described “the great, aching gift of the novel is that it offers, in its own way, the very thing that enslavement denied its descendants: the possibility of imagining the connection between the broken threads of their origins.”

At what point in its publication did you realize that this novel would come to mean so much to readers?

I think I suspected [it], even before [the book] was published, because there was an auction for the book and so there were so many–I think there were ten publishers who were bidding on the opportunity to publish it. And at the time, I was still living in Iowa. I was doing what’s called a third year, teaching these extended ed[ucation] courses online, and I didn’t know anybody else at [the University of] Iowa [Writers’ Workshop] whose book had gone to auction like that. And so that was my first inkling that it was going to be something of a big deal. And then I think the moment where it really hit home was months later: Ta-Nehisi Coates, who had just published Between the World and Me, was still on Twitter back then, and had gotten an advanced copy of the book, and was kind of live-tweeting his reading experience of it, and my friends were texting me about that, and [at that point] I realized it was going to be bigger than I thought it was going to be initially.

How does it feel to be the author of a modern classic? 

Great. I mean, it’s strange. I’m always really touched to hear that people are studying it in high school and in college. My first and most precious encounters with books that made me want to write were in high school English classes. So the idea that there are students out there who read Homegoing and feel that same kind of connection that I felt to writers like Toni Morrison is deeply meaningful to me. I don’t take that for granted.

Your second novel, Transcendent Kingdom, approaches the story of the African diaspora from another literary angle: instead of sweeping through hundreds of years and thousands of miles, it is focused upon one character, Gifty’s, personal experience, including her perception of her immigrant Ghanaian family, which is racked by tragedy and the loss of immigration. 

How have people reacted differently to a more personal, twentieth-first century story of diaspora?

I think people were really surprised by how different the second novel was. Obviously, the timeline is quite different. The structure is quite different. It’s set in the first person. So there were a lot of changes in that novel. But I think I would say that the responses to Transcendent Kingdom–even though it didn’t sell as well, and probably isn’t taught in the same way that Homegoing is–the responses that I would get from readers were often quite personal. People talked about their own struggles with addiction, or having family members who had struggles with addiction. [They talked about] their relationship to childhood [and to] religion. So I found that to be really moving as well, to have a book that had connected to people on such a personal level.

Although your work is widely read in schools around the country, your work has also been subjected to censorship. For example, Homegoing was banned from the Iowa City Community School District in 2023. The book was removed from our libraries. We aren’t allowed to choose it as a title to read in Contemporary Literature class. 

I actually didn’t know that.

Do you have any thoughts about that?

Yeah. I mean, we’re living in really terrifying times. It’s hard to wrap my head around–and it feels so obvious when you look at the language that’s being used, like books being described as ‘obscene’ or, I think Homegoing is often banned ostensibly under the guise of it being ‘sexually explicit,’ which I find interesting. And untrue. But just the excuses people are using to ban books ring so hollow and are so transparent in ways–and yet it’s still happening. It’s never a sign of a healthy society to be having people doing mass book bans. And the clear anti-Black, anti-any-writer-of-color, anti-queer bend of these bans is, I think, just a sign of the decline–[the] further decline–of this country. It scares me.

In Iowa, Governor Kim Reynolds signed a bill into law that banned any book containing sex or sex acts. Homegoing contains a fair amount of sex in key moments of the story. Why do you think it was necessary to include the sex in order to understand the story?

I always would jokingly say that if you’re going to write a multigenerational book, then people have to have babies. Like, it wouldn’t make sense not to have any sex scenes in Homegoing, considering that in every chapter, you’re following a new descendant. And sex is, of course, a part of life. I think the way that the sex scenes are done is not obscene–not something objectionable. I’ve certainly read what I would consider to be far more explicit sex scenes in classes. But sometimes, like, in books or with language that–I dunno–that people wouldn’t recognize as being particularly tawdry, or raunchy. I’m thinking even, like, something in Romeo and Juliet, which, if you are reading with a skilled teacher, you can see that there’s actually quite a bit of sex or references to sex in that piece–but nobody’s trying to ban it. 

In your opinion, what about its contents causes Homegoing to be banned from public schools? 

I think that the real reason it’s being banned is because it is very openly discusses what I think of one of the mortal sins of the country: slavery, and the ongoing effects of slavery on today’s society. I think even just the structure of the book, the fact that it ends near the present, and kind of calls out all the ways we haven’t, as a country, properly dealt with the legacy of slavery, is something that scares people. And I think that just the discomfort that white people, particularly some parents, feel about having their kids have to grapple with discomfort, is telling. Rather than use the book as an opportunity to talk about the fact that we are implicated in our history and that we continue to make and shape our country, our history–rather than talk about it in those terms, to just avoid it completely, I think is a great shame.

In which states are your books banned?

I’m not even sure. I haven’t kept a list. Truly, I haven’t kept up with it. I know it’s banned in parts of Tennessee, parts of Iowa, I think parts of my home state of Alabama. But yeah, I haven’t kept up with all the bans.

What are you working on now?

I’m very slowly working on a third novel that’s kind of an allegory, I guess, thinking about climate and also just kind of the social collapses that we’re seeing today and where they might lead in the future. So it’s probably my most speculative work.

Does the fact that your work is being banned change the way you think about writing? Do you try not to let the fact of school book bans affect what you write? Are you aware of trying to remove descriptions of ‘sex acts’ from your work?

No. I have not tried to alter my writing in any way because of the book bans. Certainly I have not tried to, like, limit or consciously decrease the amount of sex in the books in the hopes that they’ll be taught in schools. No. I think that I’m writing the same as I always have.

You mentioned, earlier, that as a country, we haven’t properly dealt with the legacy of slavery. Why do you think it’s important for young people to grapple with history and the history of slavery?

I think something that always troubled me about the way that I learned about this moment in history, or even just about history in general, is that people would talk about slavery in particular as though it were something that happened a million years ago and therefore had no bearing on our present. And as I got older, and definitely when I got to college and was able to take more varied classes than the ones offered in my high school curriculum, suddenly it was so clear how close this history was. How young America is, and therefore, how close the history is. That when we’re talking about slavery, we are still just talking about somebody’s grandmother’s grandmother. It’s not something that happened so long ago that your family wouldn’t live with the effects of it. Everyone’s family lives with the effects of it. And that the major gains that we saw during the Civil Rights era were less than a hundred years ago. [At] the time that Homegoing was written, only about 50 or 60 years ago. And that’s. . . My dad is older than that. And understanding how fragile this supposedly new racially equal society that we’re living in–heavy air quotes on that–but how fragile and how new it is, is a good way of understanding how easily it can be taken away. Which is what we’re seeing now, [with] the rampant dismantling of anything that has to do with diversity. Anything that even uses the word ‘diversity.’ I think is just again a sign of people not really understanding how close all of this is.

What else would you like to add on the subject of book bans in high schools? 

I would say, I didn’t experience any explicit book bans when I was in high school, thankfully, but I also know that one of the reasons that I’ve been able to have the career that I’ve had, that I’ve been able to pursue writing in the way that I have, is because I had really unlimited access to books when I was in high school. I loved reading so much. And I think young people are much smarter than we give them credit for, that books themselves are kind of self-limiting. Like, if a book is too hard for you, then you’re not going to get out of it what you might have otherwise gotten out of it. [So] in general, people will set down a book that isn’t working for them. And so the idea that you have to kind of shield or corral or direct your child’s reading life is already such a flawed premise. Let them read whatever they would like to read. In my experience, it only made my life richer, my world richer, and I’m really grateful that my parents didn’t stop me whenever I picked a book up.

I would also say that I think you would much rather your children encounter sex in literary fiction than you would in other places, like the internet.

Do you have any advice for City High students as readers?

No. Go for it. Read on. 

This Q&A was originally published in The Little Hawk on April 28, 2025.