Author Jerry Craft talked about efforts to ban his graphic novel New Kid with NPR in the latest of a series of interviews with authors of challenged or banned books.
Craft’s book, published in 2019 by Harper, follows Jordan, a Black seventh-grader who’s one of the only students of color at his prestigious private school. The novel won the 2019 Kirkus Prize for young readers’ literature as well as the 2020 Newbery Medal. Last year, the book was temporarily pulled from schools in Katy, Texas, after it was accused of promoting “critical race theory.”
“I do think that, as a parent, you have every right to decide what your kid can and cannot read,” Craft told NPR. “But you don’t have the right to tell me what my kid can read. Because a lot of time kids will find themselves in books.…I don’t know what it’s like at 12 years old to realize that I’m gay and I want to come out to my parents who are going to hate me and disown me because of that. But there are books with those characters that kids can find out that they’re not the only ones.”
In an essay also published at NPR, Craft wrote, “When you think of the books that have been banned over the last few years, most are by or about people of color or the LGBTQ+ community. And in many of these stories, as with my books New Kid and Class Act, the protagonists are the targets of bullying.”
He wrote that people who challenge books “invent things that never actually happen in some of the books that they work so hard to ban.”
“They throw out terms such as Marxism even though they couldn’t tell you whether it is based on the writings of Karl or Groucho,” Craft wrote. “And I sincerely doubt that anyone who criticizes a middle-grade book for teaching critical race theory (CRT) even knows what this is.”
Other authors interviewed for the ongoing NPR series include Ashley Hope Pérez (Out of Darkness) and Susan Kuklin (Beyond Magenta).
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
