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Anne Knight On Book Bans and Growing Up With Censorship
Katherine Grant: Hey, samplers, I am very excited about this week's episode, which is another deep dive into book bans here in the us. I do want to give you a quick heads up that halfway through this interview with Anne Knight, my internet completely cut out. Turns out my router needed to be restarted, but I didn't figure that out for a while, so I rejoined via my phone on Zoom.
So if you notice a difference in audio or video quality halfway through the episode, that's why. Luckily Anne was not affected and she sounds great and has wonderful things to say throughout the episode. That's my disclaimer. And now here is my interview with Anne Knight about book bans and her personal experience growing up with censorship.
Welcome to a special episode of the Historical Romance Sampler. I am returning to the topic of book bans. We first covered it a couple months ago in an episode with Olivia Waite and today I am joined by historical romance author Anne Knight to talk about book banning censorship in general, library defunding and Anne's personal experience with it as well. So quickly to introduce you to Anne. Anne Knight has been writing stories since she was three years old. Before she could read or write, she followed her parents and babysitter around begging them to dictate her words. Eventually, she learned the alphabet and began writing herself.
She sneaked her first romance novel when she was 13, but did not become an avid reader or writer of the genre until after college. Anne has lived in two countries, studied in three, and traveled through a total of 34.
Her work history includes ESL teacher, domestic violence advocate, paralegal and hospital project manager. She lives in Arkansas with her real life swoony Hero, three sons and two cats. Thank you so much for joining me today, Anne.
Anne Knight: Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here.
Katherine Grant: Yeah, this is an important topic and I think the best way to start is by defining what we're talking about.
So you and I are both members of Authors Against Book Bans, and I kind of put out a call to the romance channel saying, does anyone wanna talk about book bans with me? And you answered the call. And so when we talk about book vans, I think we're kind of using it as a, an umbrella term. How do you want to anchor that term for this conversation?
Anne Knight: Yeah. Well, I would like to, as you said, an anchor term and drill a little bit deeper into one, book Banning, and then the other side would be either what people can call soft bans or really library defunding because that's what's happening a lot in my state, specifically in some of the states around where I live.
So book banning typically is found in public library systems or school library systems where, a book is challenged for whatever reason by a member of the community and the school board or the teachers or administration decide to pull that off the shelf. And it is no longer available for the children or to the general public to read.
And that has seen a rise, especially since 2021. Specifically with groups like Moms for Liberty, which was formed in Florida in 2021 to go around and challenge a lot of books and school libraries that specifically show characters of color and LGBTQ characters. The other half tends to be library defunding, which I said happens a lot in my area of the country.
And that is when, no books are specifically called out. However the county government, the state government, whichever level is, you know, conservative and, and worried about these books being available for consumption, they will either punish a library by pulling their funding for, refusing to follow their demands.
Or they'll just preemptively start pulling things around to make sure that libraries no longer and librarians no longer have the power to, you know, defy whatever they want to be. So like a few examples in my state of library defunding was in 2023, a county judge illegally fired the head librarian of the county system.
Illegally because the judge does not have the authority to do that. It would be a library board. And it was because she refused to relocate certain books away from the children's section. They specifically said that they didn't want materials that are not subject matter or age appropriate for children due to their sexual content or imagery to an area that is not accessible to children.
And she refused, saying she would not move them because it's a small library, there's not a lot of space. You'd have to put them behind a locked door and then no one could have them. So she said that was basically banning them and they fired her. And there is now a lawsuit where she's represented by the ACLU.
And then like in 2022 there was a library up in a different county of my state, very rural, who had a gay pride exhibit beside the entrance to the children's section. And I imagine it was a lot of YA and children's stuff since it was located by the entrance to the children's section. A group got very angry about it
and said that was inappropriate sexual material for children. And so later that year were, was, the millage tax for elections. One of the local things was, do we wanna continue this millage tax to keep funding the library at, I don't know, like $4 million? And so they basically put on a misinformation campaign telling the locals in the county the library has, you know, $6 million in savings.
They did not need the millage tax. We need to cut it. And so, they did the elections, the millage tax was voted down. And what that actually meant was the library lost half of its funding pretty much overnight. And they had to cut 15 librarians. They had to end programs that went to nursing homes and daycares.
And they had to cut a lot of hours. So it's been about three years and they still haven't been able to vote that funding back in. So a lot of these are very like punitive measures against librarians and libraries who want to keep books available. Or then our state legislature voted to try to get rid of the school or the state library board so that they could move oversight of all the libraries under the governor and the executive branch. And there would not be like that level of expertise of librarians who really knew what they were doing and could protect local and rural libraries from a lot of these book banning efforts.
Katherine Grant: Yeah. Thank you for that overview. It is such a local fight. I have learned when you pay attention, there are different counties, there are different towns, there are different states. It, it happens, it's happening countrywide, but each municipality has a different type of fight happening. And I just wanna call out that.
You know, we establish in the conversation with Olivia how librarians are not just like some random person choosing books, but they're highly trained, highly educated, and they're already using industry level selection practices to determine what's in the library and what is displayed where, and what is age appropriate.
And so then these outsiders saying, oh, we need age appropriate books don't have any expertise except for their own biases. Exactly, yes. So when I put out this invitation to come speak about book bans, you mentioned that you wanted to speak a little bit from your own personal experience growing up.
Anne Knight: Yes. Yes.
Katherine Grant: So what was your experience as a reader, as a child looking for books and, and what kind of censorship did you face?
Anne Knight: Mm-hmm. So, most of my teenage years was, all of my teenage years was before this rise in like actual political book banning of 2020 and 2021. So my experience has just been like within my family and my church community and all of that, the what you might call like soft banning.
And so when I was 11, my parents joined a highly conservative fundamentalist church. And it has ties to some different kind of cult-like organizations. It's the same group with that the Duggar family has has their ties with. So like I've met the Duggars a few times. All of that.
And a lot of my friends were raised very similarly, similarly to the Duggars. My parents were like kind of on the outskirts of that kind of cult mentality because they wanted me to go to college and they cared about all of their children going to college. So we were never really fully a part of it, just because the rest of the group didn't like that
my parents put an emphasis on education, not just for children in general, but also their daughters. So that was kind of the environment I was in. My mom wanted to read everything that I was interested in before I read it to see if it was appropriate. She was not able to because I was a very fast reader and I'm the oldest of six, so she was kind of busy.
And that's how I sneaked my first romance novel at 13. It was a Francine Rivers book who's a, a Christian inspirational romance author. And was... it kind of blew my mind as to what adult, like Christian romance could even be. And so what that looked like on a practical level is one, my mom wouldn't let me check books out of the library if she felt like there was gonna be more than a few vague kisses in them.
And so I definitely sneaked things when I could. And then also, for example, some of my best friends, we were all encouraged to read a lot of historical fiction. And so so there's this book my friend had about Lady Jane Grey. And before they were allowed to read it their mom went through with a sharpie.
And she would mark out like anything involving kisses or like anything that had, like, any sort of sensual imagery anything like that. And I mean, it was not gonna be that explicit at all. So we would, you know, we would grab a lamp and we would hold the page up to the lamp so that we could read through the Sharpie.
Because obviously it was taboo, so we needed to know why it was taboo. And I was homeschooled when I was in 11th grade. We were in a co-op for like world literature and history, and the teacher used to be like a teacher before she had kids and started homeschooling her own.
And so the co-op is like when all these moms get together and they teach their the subjects that they are best at. So all the kids like get a pretty good, like education. And so she really knew what she was doing. However, before we read The Odyssey and the Iliad one of the other moms in the group was like, Hey, I want my 13-year-old daughter to be a part of this, but I'm deeply uncomfortable with her, like knowing anything about sex or whatever.
And so the poor teacher had to go through all 12 copies of the Odyssey and the Iliad and mark out with the Sharpies on all copies anything that talked about anatomy could possibly be sensual or sexual in nature. And it was absolutely ridiculous. And I think all of us
in the class knew it because we would get to a passage describing a battle, you know, and it would be like Achilles thrust his sword and it, you know, pierced this warrior just above his left, left nipple and, and nipple would be marked through. And it's just like, this is not, you know, but like, so, so that was class.
A lot of us had feelings about it, but you know, we were 17, so we are like, what were we gonna do? And then I remember going to homeschool conferences where some of the speakers would, you know, pull a book out and be, and like read a passage out loud and be like, can you believe you're letting your 12-year-old read this?
You know, if you have this in your, your shelves at home, go, you know, go throw it away. Go burn it. And it would scare a lot of the parents because they hadn't read the book, or at least not all of it, or you know, the passage was probably pulled out of context. And so, so this was the environment in which I spent my teenage years.
And so it was very harsh on literature and there were very strict expectations of what we could and couldn't read what we could and couldn't learn out of a book. And on top of that I know that some authors view the book banning, because it started in schools, as kind of a children's author issue.
But it is not, it is truly not because we know that this kind of white Christian nationalist movement just takes one bite at a time and moves and moves, right? And we don't wanna be the frog in the pot that slowly boils because I, I know exactly what all their talking points are, right? I grew up with it and
I understand where we're going and I understand what the end goal is, and that would be to ban all romance novels for public consumption. And of course they're usually, you know, they couch it in words of, you know, safety for children, right? But it goes far beyond that. I remember asking my mom when I was like, I don't know, 14 or 15, like, well if these are Christian romance novels, like why can't, why couldn't I read a Christian romance novel?
'Cause it's usually like kisses and a fade to black. And there's usually a heavy emphasis on trying to convert the, the hero before the end of the book to Christianity. And she said and this is a very common reasoning that is still like going on within this smaller community.
She was like, well reading romance novel will set you up, especially at my young age, will set you up for too high expectations for your future husband or for any man you're in a relationship with. Right, you're gonna read this book and it's all like swoony kisses and like, you know, very dramatic, you know
book level, conflict of saving you from certain doom or whatever. And then you close your book at the end of the day and you look around and your husband left his socks on the floor, and no person can live up to a fictional hero. And so it would be setting these examples in your head and you will eventually you know, resent the real people around you. And that is a theme that continues on. You know, I've read on the internet men talking about like, oh, well I don't want my wife reading a romance novel. There's no way I can live up to this like, effeminate man because these are men written by, you know, other women. It's just gonna build resentment and then it's gonna ruin what we do have because she just like can't
understand that I'm a flawed person as opposed to, you know, whatever is written on a page. And a lot of times the terms like emotional pornography will come up. This is emotional pornography. Women need to be convicted of their sin and put these aside and focus on like the man that they have in their life, their husband that God put before them.
You know, some people will just straight up say, well you know, romance novels are pornography for young girls. And even Christian romance novels specifically from like inspirational lines, you know, they would argue that that's the same. So this is very much something that affects romance authors, right?
We cannot be like, oh, well they're just focusing on school libraries. It's fine. They are not. That's just where they're beginning. And you know, we should recognize that, that their end goal is truly to get rid of any book that they don't like. They'll start with ones with sexual content or what they deem sexual content.
Right. But in the end it's gonna be every author's fight because fundamentalism is about power and control. And they, and not just control of a person, but control of knowledge. Because if you learn things, then you start questioning everything else and they can't have that.
Katherine Grant: Right, right. It's chilling.
I'm curious, you know.
You, you said that your parents really prioritized sending all your, all their children to college, but they also adopted this putting you through homeschool. Mm-hmm. In an environment where there was censorship of the texts that you were reading for school as well as the texts that you were reading for fun, how did you feel that that prepared you or didn't prepare you for the college education that you went on for?
Anne Knight: I felt very prepared for college, honestly. I went to a Christian liberal arts university with an emphasis on humanities and social sciences and all of that which is what drew me there, right. My, I had a political science major and a journalism minor and my parents. Cared very much about academic rigor, right?
In like the typical subjects you learn. One of the reasons that they chose to homeschool was we often lived in school districts that were not known for their excellence. And so just like on an academic kind of knowledge level, I was ready and I don't have any regrets about that. And in some ways I was more prepared than others.
Because even though my parents had this very strict, rigid idea of sheltering their children from the outside influences of the world they did care about, you know, cultivating curiosity and intelligence and questions. Right? So even though I wasn't allowed to read, like. Any, you know, young adult novel off the library shelf.
Like I was still, you know, by the end of high school, like I was reading, you know, Plato's Republic and some, you know, some excerpts of Nietzsche's books. And that was something that my parents did did want me to grow into. And so they encouraged like the natural curiosity I had. So my personality
and my natural interest, I think protected me from some of the worst consequences that can have from being in this environment.
And then you can see today, like I am a romance author, like. Yeah. It, it clearly did not stick. Right. Like once I was in college, like I definitely left and my, my parents also changed to an extent as well. My parents would look back on that and be like, yeah, that was not great, you know? Right. They would, they would change some of those decisions I think today if they
Katherine Grant: Yeah. There's so much fear around sex and the physical body. That even the physical body in non-sexual instances needs to be censored. I, I guess, you know, as a romance community, we'd have so much sex positivity. It sometimes feels so impossible to understand the gap, but you've crossed that bridge. So do you have any insight from getting from a place where you weren't allowed to even read them, to getting to a place where you're writing and publishing them that might be insights we can all use for connecting empathetically with each other?
Anne Knight: I guess looking at my own journey and where I am now my primary sub genre is historical romance and I would say that I came to historical romance via historical fiction, right.
I think in some ways I gravitate toward historical romance because like I can relate, right? I can relate to these characters in this very extremely rigid, highly patriarchal system where they don't have these options in ways that a lot of other romance authors.
I can only imagine things were historically right. I actually lived some versions of this. And that does impact how I write my heroines, right? It's much harder for my heroines to break the rules because I understand the social pressure. I've lived the social pressure actually, I understand actually how hard it would've been.
And, what it means to be ostracized by your community. Right? I understand. Like I, as a teenager, I would live in fear of making, you know, a mistake. It getting around, the other girls seeing it, it would get around the parents and then all of a sudden, like no one would wanna be friends with me anymore, right?
Because I was rebellious or I was independent, or you know, I was boy crazy or whatever. And so I think I understand that rigid kind of expectation that was put upon women historically. And then the desire to go to college when that was considered like a countercultural radical
shift a move. You know, my parents always wanted me to go to college. They always supported me. They, they just straight up told me I was going. They, they didn't give me an option, but but a lot of my friends were told, oh, you're not gonna go to college. You're not gonna go to college. And then all of a sudden they were 18 and then the parents were like, oh.
Well, no man is waiting in the wings to marry her. So actually I guess she has to go to college and they were put into college completely unprepared, and they really did flounder. They really didn't know, you know, they weren't ready with algebra or biology. They didn't have the, some of the social skills to like, interact with people who disagreed with them or lived different, you know, lives.
Mm-hmm. Because it is so insular, right? So I think that does impact my writing and my characters. I also, I think that you know, established, you know, long-term readers of the genre and authors as well, you know, people who kind of eat, breathe and sleep, you know, romance novels need to remember, or, or learned that there are these girls who are growing up like I did.
Coming, you know, with very little sex education, very little understanding of the way, you know, adult romantic relationships can look, you know, because, you know, gender roles are very strictly defined and learn and, and realizing that like these, not that romance novels or any novel has to be prescriptive, right?
Not that any like, couple has to be like relationship goals because, you know, fiction is a place where we can be messy and we can, you know, look at different dynamics and different people and, and moralities. But knowing that there is a segment of society, of these teenage girls and young adults growing up without an understanding, without a framework of sexual ethics or you know, different possibilities for relationship dynamics.
And, and it can be a great opportunity to say, look, look at this big wide world. You know, here's one fictional example of what your life, what you could pursue, right? And that. That made a pretty big impact on me going into college. I learned, I watched the Law and Order SVU a lot for some reason when I was in college.
I don't know why. And I learned so much more about sexual ethics from watching that show than I ever learned from like my parents church, anything. Right? And, I learned more about how to navigate tricky, you know, dynamics in situations. And I think romance novels can also do that in a way that's very centric to I don't wanna say centric to women because romance novels are for everyone.
But you know, a large portion of them are written by women with women audience in mind and learning. To celebrate, you know, women's pleasure, women's independence, all of that is very freeing. Mm-hmm. It was freeing for me and I want to pass that on to any other readers who stumble across my books in the future.
And I think it can be helpful for other authors to keep that in mind too, that there are these people out there who might become their readers from this background.
Katherine Grant: Thank you so much for sharing your personal experience. Knowing this is happening and it's increasing since 2021, and even from 2024 into 2025, it's increasing, do you have any thoughts for what the average historical romance reader in the US can do to help fight back against library defunding or book banning in general?
Anne Knight: Yeah, absolutely. Well. Firstly, I would like to say that I'm very ticked off. I left these people and how dare they come after me? Like I, I'm so angry when I think about how hard I worked to get away and I thought, oh, these are just like fringe crazy people, right? Like I left. It's a cult by definition.
A cult is insular and doesn't spread right. And so I'm just really ticked off. They're not allowed to follow me. It just makes me very angry that they did. But as for what an average reader can do, well one, an author can join Authors Against Book Bans and an illustrator, and I think editors as well.
And so I highly recommend that. For your average reader, what I would say is learn what's going on specifically in your community. A lot of times there's nonprofits or groups called, you know, friends of your local library, join that. And you can be in the loop on whatever difficulties the library's facing.
Especially considering a lot of the federal funding that has they're trying to strip through the IMLS grants. You can learn more about like how that's gonna impact your specific local library and what you can do to help kind of fill in that gap, whether it's, you know, volunteering shifts or whether it's running a donation opportunity to keep the libraries fully funded.
Whether it's aware to spread the issues to other people. For schools I would just be more involved and learn about what the school library's facing. You can be aware of any bannings or challenges that come up. You know, there's stories of just anyone who's not even a parent
just walking into the school in Texas, I heard that there was just some person who walked in and they had 900 books on a list, 900 books, and were like, this isn't acceptable. I want any of these taken out of the library. I'm like, that's. Disingenuous at best. And so, so being involved, so you would hear about these things when they happen and so you can respond, you could talk to the school administration about creating a form or something of if you wanna challenge this book, fill out this form, and you have to fill out this form for every single book you wanna challenge.
No one's gonna fill out 900 that would discourage it. Even potentially running for school board, right? Because a lot of these decisions are made. A, a lot of the official bans are made at the school board level where there's a vote and everyone can go in and say their piece. So actually running for school board.
I just think there's a lot of opportunities whether it's your school library, your public library you know, getting to know librarians.
One thing our group did last month was we did a postcard party which is actually from what I've heard from people, actually really effective and really makes a difference of just everyone getting together, writing a postcard to libraries and just saying like, Hey, we see what you, what you're doing.
We see what you're up against. We really appreciate you. Thanks for everything. And we mailed them out and I've heard like just those little notes of encouragement really help. Especially in states like mine where in the legislative session there's just bill, after bill, after bill of trying to like, eat away at libraries, fire librarians, just any of that, right?
And just having that note of encouragement can make a huge difference. So even just little things like that can really like help the people around you and build the strength within the community that we all need to get through these difficult times.
Katherine Grant: Yeah, that's really lovely. And like we were saying, this book banning and censorship is happening at such a local level that it is different in each municipality, but it actually, to me,
feels a little bit more hopeful and possible to fight it because it's local. Yeah. As opposed to so many things that it feels like, I really disagree with that, but I, it's too global for me to do anything. You in your community have a huge voice and you matter, and you and your friend who's a reader, you can team up and see what you can do.
And I really wanna plug EveryLibrary.org, which is a great place to get started. They support local library efforts. So you sign up and you tell them where you are and it will plug you in. So you know, like if there's already a group that's fighting for your library or if there's some action going on, and they also send news updates.
And so throughout this year, ever since I joined, every month or so, I get some local news update from Every Library about a library that was under threat and because of the community pushed back and, and defended the library. So I I agree. Please pay attention to what's going on in your city, county, state and get involved.
Anne Knight: Yes,
Katherine Grant: Yeah. Well, Anne, thank you so much for coming on. You have shared a lot of expertise and also a lot of your personal experience and I really admire you and I admire how you've brought this into your work and your historical romances. I'm gonna put a link to your website in the show notes so people can check out your historical romances.
And yeah. Thank you so much for coming on, and hopefully we have you back soon to read a sample of your work.
Anne Knight: I would love that. Thank you very much, Katherine.
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