3
votes
UnbanCoolies interview with Ashley Hope Peréz, author of Out of Darkness
Link information
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- Title
- A Ray of Light in Literary Darkness - Author Ashley Hope Perez #bookban
- Authors
- Unban COOLIES
- Duration
- 56:50
- Published
- Nov 6 2023
Christopher is a high school student advocating for the unbanning of books by interviewing banned authors, and he is doing (IMO) a pretty amazing job.
Here, he's interviewing Ashley Hope Peréz. (Full disclosure, Ashley is my sister). They are discussing Out of Darkness, a book she published in 2015, but that has become a target of many book-ban challenges in the past few years, so that it is now one of the top ten banned books. It's a young-adult novel about an interracial romance woven around the natural gas explosion in a New London, Texas school in the 1930s. This tragedy is what led to the addition of an oderant to natural gas lines.
Since I follow Ashley's work in the media, I was surprised by how special this interview felt to me. I feel like it is a much deeper dive into the story and the way the story is built and how it connects to the historical record of that time. Part of it may be the time factor (it's about an hour long), but I feel like many of her adult interviewers don't get past are the discussion of book banning and the current political moment in the US. Even though that is something I care about, it can feel a little repetitive. So this is something special, and I wanted to share it.
Trigger warnings: discussions of racialized violence, sexual abuse, and the death of children