The Death of the Book: Mourning Literature Lost

Death Scene 1: Burned

One of the earliest memories of Iowa involved watching a 27 minute long Facebook Live recording in 2018 in which Paul Dorr, Director of Rescue the Perishing, dropped LGBTQ+ youth literature into a burn barrel. The flames jumped over the barrel rim as the books burned. These books ranged from picture books to young adult literature, and each had been removed from the Orange City Public Library preceding the city's second annual Pride event. During the Facebook Live event, Dorr couched his actions as religious activism, and he read from a blog post entitled "May God And The Homosexuals of OC Pride Please Forgive Us!." Ultimately, Dorr was found guilty of 5th degree criminal mischief and forced to pay a $65 fine and 35% surcharge for court costs for destroying library property.

Literalizing Fahrenheit 451, Dorr brought about the death of four books. While on the one hand that death is a material one—indeed those books were burned beyond recognition—on the other, he strove for a symbolic death: to burn away the stories and histories of queer and trans people in the name of his religious ideology.

Death Scene 2: Bombed

Five years later, I was living in Iowa when books became bombs. Following a tweet from the anti-LGBTQ+ group Libs of TikTok, two bomb threats were made at a local junior high. Students were evacuated, and student teachers were barred access to the building. While no actual bombs were detected, the books nonetheless detonated. They wiped out hundreds of hours of instruction from students' lives and, in return, were themselves wiped out. Though the threats made no mention of the book, This Book is Gay by Juno Dawson was removed from that school library as well as from every library in the district.

While ultimately the book was returned following formal reconsideration, it experienced a circulatory death. Students did not have access to the book while it was under consideration, despite American Library Association procedure guidelines. While not a material death, these books—again containing LGBTQ+ stories—were removed from circulation and were dead, at least functionally, to students.

Death Scene 3: Buried

These death scenes of burned and bombed books led me to study book banning in Iowa. From 2023-2024, I interviewed educators from across the state to understand how educational censorship policy Senate File 496 banned nearly 3400 books in a single academic year. In one of those interviews, Sami, an experienced community librarian, explained that some books experienced death by burial. He shared that books were buried behind displays, dropped behind fixtures, or even hidden on top of shelves. He further explained that these books fell into one of two categories: board books dropped by young children or LGBTQ+ children's literature that had been deliberately hidden.

Both literally and metaphorically buried, these books were hidden behind displays and fixtures or on top of library stacks to prevent access. Again targeting LGBTQ+ books for young people, this death by burial—though a quiet one—removed the stories and histories of queer and trans people from circulation and, by extension, children's imaginations.

Measured Mourning

Whether through burning, bombing, or burial, these deaths raise questions about the importance of physical books for students and teachers, teaching and learning. Do the blackened ashes of burned books matter, when the text remains accessible within the public domain? Does retaining a book-turned-bomb matter, if hundreds of hours of student learning are lost? And does a buried book matter, if another book on the shelf could share a similar story of history and community? Inhabiting the tension between the stakes of singular book bans and wide-scale erasure, I consider the potential of mourning literature lost, or grieving and then moving on from literary texts that have been burned, bombed, or buried. Mourning offers a pragmatic strategy to teachers in a time of unprecedented book bans. However, such pragmatism must be tempered by the civic responsibility to resist cultural erasure at broader scales.

PEN America, a free expression advocacy organization, tallied 22,810 instances of books banned in US public schools between 2021 and 2025. Steadily growing since 2021, these bans are part of larger efforts to erode civic participation and the democratic process by limiting intellectual freedom and free expression. While these numbers are astounding, I wonder at their importance in a moment when literature is created and accessed at unprecedented rates online. Archive of Our Own, a fanfiction repository, estimates that is has published 16,090,000 works, and each is readily accessible via handheld device. Such digital platforms expand access to literary quantity, while also raising concerns about literary quality. Likewise, the public domain offers students and teachers access to many classical texts, including banned books like 1984, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and Romeo and Juliet, at the click of a button. While not every work of fanfiction is a literary masterpiece and accessing the public domain requires both money and knowledge, teachers can support students to locate high-quality digital literature through platform affordances and evaluative techniques, and they can do so while keeping the cultural temperature below Fahrenheit 451.

Undoubtedly, digital technologies have changed the politics of access to literature in ways that reframe the importance of material books. Need we mourn the books thrown into Paul Dorr's burn barrel when we can download them online before the pages finish burning? For me, this reality reduces the grief associated with such material deaths of books. It does not, however, mitigate the symbolic death of queer peoples, stories, and histories that mark the politics of literary representation. For those of us who watched the Facebook Live prior to it being taken down, Dorr's actions were symbolic of widespread desires to erase queer and trans people from the world. Accordingly, the material book becomes symbolic of something more than the paper, pulp, and ink that make it up. It becomes a symbol of an inclusive democracy, in which young people can see mirrors or windows to their own or others' experiences, and removing such symbols would never be a death worth mourning. I argue that, instead, we must keep some ghosts alive, allowing their burned literary bodies to remain with us in imagination and, so too, the stories they represent.

Beyond burned books, bombed books are likewise implicated in today's digitizing world. Indeed, digital technologies like e-readers and textual formats like PDFs have made literature more accessible than ever before. However, even a digital text can become a bomb, one that decimates instructional time and even careers. In 2023, Katie Rinderle was placed on administrative leave and subsequently terminated from her elementary teaching position in Georgia after reading My Shadow is Purple, a picture book commonly considered to include trans representation. A picture book ended Rinderle's career, wiping out her future as an educator and so too her instructional impact on countless students. Instances such as Rinderle's raise the question: is any singular book worth it? Is any singular book, whether physical or digital, so indispensable that another text could not take its place? Put another way, is a book worth a career? The answer, in my opinion, is likely not. I imagine this answer is surprising, especially as I have built a career arguing for the inclusion of LGBTQ+ youth literature in schools. However, I know that queer and trans stories will never be wholly erased from schools or society. Censors can delete LGBTQ+ definitions and history from a government website or make our existence illegal in school curriculum, but they can never remove queerness and transness from the world.

Furthermore, critical educators have long circumvented the constraints of approved curriculum and, through pedagogical dexterity, have included myriad stories barred from classrooms. However, pragmatically, losing a teacher to a single picture book loses long-term advocacy in exchange for fighting a short-term battle. Importantly, teachers have been reading queerness and gender creativity in literature long before it could be explicitly represented or taught in schools, and more recently, educators like myself have proposed strategies to center students' capacities to tell diverse stories, even when specific books are banned. Accordingly, the realities of book banning today lead me to recall wise counsel from Henry, a working teacher in Iowa whom I interviewed for my book banning study. He said quite simply, "strategize for the long game." Straightforward and pragmatic, this advice takes on new importance when books can become bombs at any time. Whether removing students from schools or teachers from classrooms, a singular book is rarely worth the loss of learning or livelihood. Accordingly, I think it's important for teachers to mourn singular texts, when needed. It's also okay to let them go, particularly when the short-term loss, such as the loss of a teacher like Rinderle from her classroom, upsets the long-term strategy of including diverse representation in schools.

However, the stakes of mourning changes when we consider the scope and scale of book bans today and their explicit targeting of diverse youth literature. The 22,810 lost literary works since 2021 were not equally spread across genres and representations. Instead, these deaths concentrated around diverse youth literature from picture books to young adult texts that feature racial, gender, and sexual diversity. Moreover, recent Supreme Court decision Mahmoud v Taylor expands this censorship by declaring parents' rights to be notified of opt-out options for LGBTQ+ content on the grounds of religious exemption. While I encourage mourning singular texts for pragmatic purposes, grieving the loss of 22,810 books is an altogether different process, and the potential losses are not merely the texts themselves. Such losses portend the dissolution of our democracy. A single-prong of a wide-ranging attack, book banning today operates in concert with wider assaults on intellectual freedom and free expression that are impacting schooling from elementary through higher education. Educational gag orders and educational censorship are undermining civic access to information through control of curricular content, materials, and instruction, and they braid with efforts to undermine US democracy, like the attempted revocation of birthright citizenship or posited undermining of presidential term limits.

These realities place mourning in a different context, that of civic responsibility. Mourning the loss of a singular book differs qualitatively and quantitatively from mourning the loss of a democracy that 22,810 banned books herald. Does allowing any ban to go unchallenged cede ground in the battle for US democracy? Truly, can we afford to mourn any literature lost, to let it go and move on, particularly in schools? In terms of teachers and teaching, I believe that context is everything, as is capacity. Some veteran teachers or a community leader might argue against the loss of an LGBTQ+ picture book at a school board meeting with little threat to the livelihood or social standing. Likewise, a new teacher might have nothing to lose in a particular school, district, or state context and, thus, choose to speak back to power, even at great risk. I do not advocate teacher martyrdom—what some have argued is a hallmark of the profession today—but I do believe in teacher autonomy. Teachers must live out their values, and while I believe in the usefulness of mourning, I also believe that it should be done in measure. Each teacher must decide when and whether to mourn as a pragmatic one-off strategy or an on-going civic responsibility.

While on an individual basis, we might strategize for the long game, grieving a singular text and moving on, the larger scope of book bans is something we cannot afford to mourn. Democracy is eroding in schools as it is more broadly in US civic life, and books both material and symbolic provide us an opportunity for resistance. Whether burned, bombed, or buried, books shape who and what we imagine, and the target placed on diverse youth literature spotlights which students' stories are welcome in US schools today. For this reason, while we might do well to mourn banned books on a small scale, on a larger one, we must allow ourselves to be haunted. To feel and remember the pain of books burned, characters bombed, and literary worlds buried from recognition.

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James Joshua Coleman (Josh) is an Assistant Professor of English Education in Arizona State University's Department of English. He is the author of the forthcoming monograph Ban Censorship, Not Books: How Teachers, Schools, and Communities Can Fight for Intellectual Freedom. His current research supports teachers and other educational stakeholders to challenge classroom censorship in communities and schools.