The new anthology Banned Together: Our Fight for Readers’ Rights (Holiday House, March 4) features a wide array of storytelling approaches—short stories, poetry, essays, graphic formats—to address the urgent topic of book bans. The book is edited by Ashley Hope Pérez, whose 2015 novel, Out of Darkness, has been a frequent target of censors, and it features contributions from Nikki Grimes, Elana K. Arnold, Traci Sorell, Trung Le Nguyen, and others, with illustrations by Debbie Fong. Together, they underscore the power of books to help young people understand the world around them, and the importance of protecting that power.

In one section, Maia Kobabe remembers that many of the people in line to get their copy of Gender Queer signed at an event in 2019 were librarians. And all of them had the same message: “I know exactly who I want to give this to!” For Kobabe, this warm reception served as affirmation that it wasn’t only family and friends who were interested in the memoir, which recounts Kobabe’s gender and identity journey. Just a couple of years later, though, the book received a very different kind of attention: Conservative parents and legislators sought to banish the title from public schools. For a time, Gender Queer was the most banned book in the country.

In a starred review, Kirkus calls the anthology a “critically timely blueprint for action.” Pérez and I recently spoke by phone to discuss the anthology; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What’s your goal with Banned Together?

When I think about the goals of the anthology, one was helping young people, like my former students, know what’s missing from their libraries or from the libraries of other students in this country.

I also wanted to give young people tools to respond, to find the books, to understand what they’re missing and why that matters, and to create a resource for librarians. Over and over we hear about the incredible strain that censorship efforts place on hardworking teachers and librarians. It creates a toxic environment. It pushes people out of the profession. It diverts resources from what they came to the job to do, which is to help students.

I want to give librarians, even in the most ravaged districts, a book they can buy that includes the works of the authors whose writing they’ve been forced to remove.

The anthology includes an all-star cast of YA authors and illustrators. How did you go about finding and selecting contributors?

One of the few silver linings of being in the book-ban nightmare since the one [that targeted my book and many others] in Leander, Texas, in 2021, is that I’ve gotten to work with so many incredible authors and advocates. I had a robust personal network of folks who’ve been engaging in and staying with advocacy for young people and who have the capacity to do this work. One thing we can’t emphasize enough is the cost for creators of censorship.

I started with the authors I’ve been working with, whether fellow plaintiffs in lawsuits in Florida, folks I’ve been on panels with, or folks we’ve been on group calls with. I put out a broad call and then followed up with certain people. And then all of the usual stuff—a lot of hustle.

Nobody was doing this for some big advance. I mean, this is every writer’s worst nightmare: losing access to our audiences and knowing that the people we write for, the people we care about, the people whose lives we believe are transformed by access to literature, are missing those chances to have a fuller sense of the world, to become really joyful, engaged readers. Kids are walking into libraries and looking around and thinking that there aren’t any books out there for them because none of those books are in the library.

The structure of the anthology is striking: poetry, essays, graphic narratives, short stories. How did you decide on taking a multigenre approach?

When I was a high school English teacher, one of the things I discovered working with students who had barriers to engagement with reading and writing was that multigenre approaches were really appealing to them, both in terms of texts they related to and in terms of their own writing.

I’ve contributed to anthologies and I admire so many different approaches, but one of the things that I wanted with this anthology was for it to have a very invitational feeling, so that if you pick it up, anywhere you are, you have a sense of being pulled in. And because different readers have that experience with different kinds of texts, having a range supports that.

So the aspiring poet who flips through and sees that poem has a hook. The person whose way of engaging with literature is graphic narrative—there it is. There’s also just something about visual diversity when you’re looking at a text. I like the ways we use purple in the text so that the resource pages really stand out because they have a purple background. A student who’s flipping through with a very practical What can I do about this? mindset gets right to those lists of books and lists of strategies.

I get annoyed when people think of multigenre collections as existing because we all have short attention spans and we have to be grabbed every moment. Well, no. Anthologies, to be successful, have to invite people in in multiple ways.

The book takes these difficult themes and directs them at adolescents—it doesn’t shy away from treating these young readers as smart, capable interpreters of the world around them. What are your thoughts on that relationship?

People who actually work with adolescents understand that teenagers aren’t the ones who are afraid of the difficult topics. That fear belongs to adults. That discomfort belongs to adults. That anxiety about tricky conversations comes from adults.

I don’t mean to say that every young person is teed up to engage with a book like my novel, Out of Darkness. It’s really heavy and intense and confronts a lot. That’s not everybody’s cup of tea or the right thing for every reader at a given time. But what we know about young people is that when something’s not a fit for them, they just close the book and leave it there for someone else. It’s not a complicated transaction.

I want people to close a book that isn’t right for them at that moment they feel overwhelmed by or unprepared for [it]. Great—close it. Leave it there for someone else. All of it comes back to this fundamental belief in the seriousness and maturity of young people and, frankly, their right to know about the world that they’re responsible for.

If we’re talking about kids ages 13 to 19, if we think about that range, we’re talking about people who are a handful of years away from being responsible for adult realities. And you don’t turn 18 and someone flips a switch and, boom, you have all of the resources you need to navigate that. It’s a process of developing that capacity.

So taking young people seriously is both out of respect for their readiness to do the difficult work of reading about challenging topics and also out of necessity, because they deserve to know about the world that they’re moving into as adults.

Brandon Tensley is the national politics reporter at Capital B.