Buxton Books is proud to team up with Marjory Wentworth, Former Poet Laureate of South Carolina, to hold a very special Read Across South Carolina event! This is a free, in-store event. No RSVPs required.
We have always loved celebrating banned books here at Buxton Books. After all, what would our shelves be without titles like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue, Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell’s And Tango Makes Three, and so many more? That’s a rhetorical question because the answer is quite obvious - they’d be pretty pitiful!
But if you’ve been paying attention to the news recently, you know that the effort to combat book-banning is taking on renewed importance with campaigns to remove large swaths of books from shelves gaining steam. Here in South Carolina, book challenges are on the rise, and most of the books receiving challenges are those of marginalized groups.
So on April 19, Buxton Books and Marjory Wentworth have extended an invite to members from all over the Charleston community to come read from their favorite banned books and discuss what book-banning means to them. We hope to celebrate these books and educate the community about what they can do to ensure that our curiosity, intellectual freedom, and reading life is as rich and powerful as possible!
Joining us are community members including (but not limited to):
Mary Alice Monroe (author)
Rev. Jeremy Rutledge (pastor at Circular Congregational Church)
Brian Hicks (journalist)
Asia Mae (poet)
Damon Fordham (author, educator, Charleston tour guide)
Larissa Bortz (high school English teacher)
Paul Bowers (journalist and activist)
This event will be held in conjunction with many other Read Across South Carolina events happening at bookstores and libraries across the state in late April, including the event that inspired it all, Read-In 2023 at the South Carolina State House. Use #ReadAcrossSC to connect on social media!
Want to learn more? Try some of the resources below: