Author Dave Eggers visited Minnesota earlier this month to join students, parents, and teachers in protest over book bans at a local school.
Eggers, along with authors Kelly Barnhill and Anne Ursu and McSweeney’s executive director and publisher Amanda Uhle, joined students, parents, and teachers from St. Francis Area Schools on May 5 to discuss the impact of ongoing book bans in the school district about 40 miles north of Minneapolis. Representatives from PEN America, EveryLibrary, and Minnesota Authors Against Book Bans were present, as well.
In November, the St. Francis School Board passed a policy to delegate control over which books may be offered in its school libraries or purchased by the district to BookLooks, a website linked to conservative activist group Moms for Liberty. The policy was approved against the recommendations of the district’s superintendent and attorney.
More than 40 books have been removed because of the policy, among them “The Kite Runner,” “Beloved,” “Brave New World,” “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and Nobel Prize winner Eli Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir, “Night.”
In response, St. Francis High School students staged a walkout and “read-in” of some of the titles, and Education Minnesota-St. Francis and the ACLU Minnesota each filed lawsuits. Subsequently, the district paused the new bans in response to the lawsuits, and BookLooks ceased operation on March 23.
“The people of St. Francis show how it’s done,” Eggers said in a statement to PEN America. “Faced with an un-American and unconstitutional book ban, they took quick and strategic action. They showed up at school board meetings. They rallied teachers, students and parents. They called the ACLU. They sued. And they’ve dealt a significant, national blow against those who would deprive Americans of their fundamental right to read freely.”
In addition to providing solidarity, Eggers and Uhle arranged for their foundation, The Hawkins Project, along with Scout & Morgan Books of Cambridge, Minnesota, to provide St. Francis High School seniors with free copies of a banned book of their choice from PEN’s banned-book list.
Eggers also screened the documentary “To Be Destroyed,” which follows him as he travels to Rapid City, South Dakota, in 2021, where the local school board banned his 2013 book, “The Circle,” along with works by Alison Bechdel, Stephen Chbosky, Bernardine Evaristo, and Imbolo Mbue. Through footage of heated school board meetings, community rallies, and interviews with locals, viewers learn how these books were designated “to be destroyed.”
You can watch the documentary in full below.
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Photo of book cart from St. Francis High School Library, courtesy of Education Minnesota-St. Francis.
